The View From North Central Idaho

Nice! Free gun training at Front Sight Training Institute for Starbucks employees:

Front Sight Firearms Training Institute is ranked among the best places in the world to receive firearms training and self defense training.

In support of Starbucks for not buckling to the hand-wringing gun-grabbers with the Brady campaign, Washington ceasefire and the million mom march, the Founder of Front Sight, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, has decided to award the employees at Starbucks a $2,000, four day defensive handgun course!

What can the Brady Campaign offer in return?

Gun owners have all the carrots. The Brady Campaign only has a stick.

Slightly off topic is that I have a similar deal (see the link in the right column?) that I need to take cash in on sometime. Any Starbucks employees or blog readers/writers want to attend the same class at the same time?

Ry and I went to range today. We had some problems with some CCI Mini-Mag ammo. Ry has pictures.

He also told me of going to a party last night. The most memorable things he said were, "Drunk artists have poor muzzle control" and that he had to sign a waiver before being allowed in the door. Pictures from last night are here.

That's fire and brimstone.  This is pure gun geekery, and even for gun geeks its nerdy because it's about percussion guns of the 1800s.  You've been warned.

Saturday, Nephew and I tried some heavy loads for the repro 1858 Remington revolver.  I'd been using a 28 grain powder charge and a round ball with decent results, but wanted to try something with more pep.  Civil War era military loads ranged from very light, to as much powder and lead as could be stuffed in the cylinder.  To start, we tried round ball (~140 grains) over a charge of 39 grains of 3F Goex with a greased felt wad in between.  That load filled the chambers completely and delivered an average of 925 fps at 10 feet with an extreme spread of 46.  Not too bad.  The 29 grain charge was yielding a velocity of about 850 fps.

It's like pulling teeth to find acceptable "conical" bullets ("bullet shaped" as opposed to a round ball) for these ".44" percussion revolvers unless you cast your own, which I don't.  I did find some Buffalo Bullets 180 grain jobs that fit the chambers nicely, and ordered 100 of them to try.  Since the bullet takes up more room in the chamber, the most powder I could get in and still seat the bullet below the cylinder face was 30 grains.  But, wow.  Average velocity was 1047 fps.  That's a tad better than a .40 S&W, and matches the V of a .45 Auto load in the Speer manual for their 185 gr GDHP.  Extreme spread was 67, with a standard deviation of 21.

That was with two different people doing the loading.  I'm going to guess that with the same person loading all the rounds, the charge weight and ramming pressure would be a little more consistent, and so too the velocity.  Groups with this load opened up slightly from last week's all-ball venture, but not enough to be sure.  This time was in direct sunlight, which makes aiming a little more difficult.

The extra pressure it takes to move the heavier bullet, which also has more friction surface against the bore, I will assume ramps up the powder's burn rate.  More velocity with less powder and a heavier bullet.  Neat.  We've found a performance, or efficiency, zone.  More pressure equals more heat, equals a faster, more complete burn inside the bore, equals yet more pressure.

This is how guns (and sometimes chemical factories, engines, etc.) blow up-- things look great as you increase the pressure and temp a little.  The reaction speeds up, a little bit more, things are doing fine, a little bit more and, Boom!.  A threshold is reached and a runaway reaction takes place.  You shear some bolt lugs, or burst a cylinder, etc. and maybe you go home with slightly fewer or slightly misshapen body parts.  That can be embarrassing.

I wasn't worried about this load in a modern repro made with modern steel.  When these revolvers were designed and built originally, metallurgy wasn't anything like it is today, and even back then they were known to stuff the chambers full on a regular basis.  Further, it makes no sense to build a cylinder that will take more powder than it can handle with the commonly used "44-100" bullets of up to 250 grains.  That would take more material and make the gun bigger and heavier, for no other reason than to encourage over-pressure loads.  I'm also running on some faith that they wouldn't have done that (though the much longer 1847 .44 Colt "Walker" cylinder was known to occasionally let go).  Remember that back then there was only black powder, not the wide spectrum of nitro powders we have now.  All they had to control the powder's burn rate were different granulations of the same mixture (though brand and lot inconsistency would likely have thrown in some degree of uncertainty).  With smokeless propellants you can get into a LOT MORE TROUBLE making your own loads.

Here's Nephew torching off one of the heavy loads.  The bullet has been on its way for about a millisecond, as the gun is still in firing position and the hot gas (I mean hot-- this is in direct sunlight) has traveled a foot or so out from the muzzle;

Below is the same shot in full recoil a fraction of a second later.  Forget about quick follow-up shots.  You can't see the target until the smoke clears. By then you're re-cocked and ready to go.  A side wind would be a big help in this case;

Today's rapid fire guns wouldn't be worth as much if they had to run on black powder.  For one thing you wouldn't be able to see squat.  It is "interesting" to take a shot, and find that your target has simply disappeared after the smoke has cleared.  There's that moment of uncertainty.

I like the slow, frame-by-frame animations as below.  You can see the mechanics of the recoil (though a high speed camera would be nice).  You can watch the force wave travel from his wrist, into the arm, the shoulder, and whole torso.  Nephew's grip is fairly relaxed, which isn't a problem with a medium weight 44 revolver.  Some people hate animated gifs on a web page.  I'm one of them, but this is for science;

You shouldn't haul off and max out your charcoal burner just because I did.  I'm not saying it's the thing to do.  What I can say is; I still, for the moment, have all my body parts (and gun parts) and all are operating satisfactorily, thank you.  I have a load that's within the range of those used in the 1860s for the Remington New Model Army revolver and 1860 Colt Army, and it matches some of the .45 ACP loads for a ~180 grain bullet.

Now here's a puzzler.  I've had barrel leading in modern revolvers and autos firing bare lead, hard-cast or swaged bullets.  Using pure, soft lead bullets in the '58 Remington and '51 Colts, no leading has been observed, even with these loads that achieve modern handgun KE levels.  I don't know why.  Is it the grease?  But we're told in no uncertain terms never to lubricate a modern gun bore, while black powder guns are greased all to hell.  Is it the propellant temp?  But the KE is the same.

Say Uncle linked to a small, light suppressor for a 300 WM.

People often say my 300 WM is extremely loud and I frequently wear both plugs and muffs when shooting it. I have sometimes thought of getting a suppressor for it but the extra weight at the end of the barrel didn't seem like a good idea. The threads holding the barrel to the receiver have enough stress on them with the heavy barrel I have. But this suppressor weighs just 13.9 ounces and is only nine inches long!

My first thought was "I have to have one!"

Then I looked at the price: MSRP $1800.

I'd have to save up my birthday money for something like the next 30 years to be able to afford that.

This sort of thing appears with some regularity on the forums, product reviews, etc., so I can only assume there is a significant number of people who don't quite understand how a shot group on a target is measured.  What I recently read on an ammo review is that, since the bullet is x diameter, your group size cannot be less than x.

That's not how it works. (Boomershooters bear with me, I'm pretty sure you all know this)  For the size of your group on the target, you're measuring the center-to-center distance between hits.  If your holes were clean enough to allow such precise measurements, it is in theory possible to have half-inch diameter bullets and a group size of a hundredth of an inch or less.  You could just as well, theoretically, have an eighteen inch Navy ship's gun that shoots a group of 1" (all rounds through the same hole, to within one inch of center).  Actually getting a gun and several projectiles to do that is of course another matter, but it wouldn't violate the simple theory of taking a distance measurement on your target.

This isn't rocket science.  Well, maybe some aspects of shooting are in fact rocket science, but measuring the distance between centers of a few holes isn't complicated, and has nothing to do with the diameter of the holes.  Any carpenter, machinist or cabinet maker, etc. knows this, and it is often learned by farm mechanics in early childhood.

As others have noted Michael Bane has announced he and his film crew will be attending Boomershoot 2010. I've known about it since mid-October when he sent me an email that said, in part:

I want to give you a heads up...I would like to film Boomershoot 2010, if it works for you. It would either be for my flagship, SHOOTING GALLERY, or for a new show I have in the works under the working title of AMERICA SHOOTS! You'd rather have it be AMERICA SHOOTS! because it will be hosted by the hysterically funny an spectacularly beautiful Katie Rowe, a professional stuntwoman and obsessive shooter.

Again, if it works for you, I'd like to put together some live coverage on DOWN RANGE (www.downrange.tv).

I held back on announcing it because I wanted to the plans to be a little more firm.

I don't know his exact schedule yet but I'm hoping he will cover the target making on Saturday too.

I've had an 1858 Remington New Model Army revolver for a while, but was never able to get decent accuracy from it.  Maybe it was the wrong grip fit for my hands.  Maybe it was the extra weight and maybe it was the very long creep in the trigger.  Don't know, but it had been sitting for a long time, such that the grease was getting stiff, so I took it out alone for some exercise yesterday.

I'd been experimenting with bird shot loads in handguns because I'm interested in handgun trap shooting.  Turns out the rifling pretty well renders that a losing proposition (I could get a spare barrel for the 1851 Colt repro, and ream out the rifling. we'll see).  Anyway, I ended up with a selection of fiber wads and cards for the .44 Remington, and since my current charge of 28 grains 3F Goex takes up little room in the chambers, and since everyone says the projectile should be close to the forcing cone for best accuracy, I added a quarter inch fiber wad on top of the powder, with a felt wad on top of that.

Now the revolver shoots OK.  Don't know if it was the extra spacing, or that I'd been handling the gun a lot more, but I was able to match my long standing 25 yard grouping (previously held by the 1851 Colt) several times that day, with this gun.  It may not be anything to brag about, but it's better than I've done with any automatic so far.  That's 25 yards, standing, two hands, unsupported.  I'm sure there are people who can do a whole lot better, but as the saying goes, "This is my group. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

That's the way it went several times-- four shots in a decent group, with one flier.  It didn't matter whether the group was fired from one cylinder, the other cylinder, or a combination of the two.  I shot a smaller group that day, but this one gives me hope that those four in the middle better represent the gun's potential.

There was zero wind that day, such that when I was all done, there was a layer of white smoke that covered the whole 5 to 7 acre range.  Cool.  It also means that you have to learn to aim through a cloud of smoke.

Several shooter have written about this other phenomenon; I found myself contentedly driving under the speed limit on the way home, which is something I practically never do.  I'm usually irritated by people who drive under the limit, the lot of serene bastards.  It seems that shooting can have a pronounced relaxing effect that can last for several hours after the fact.

Via email from veteran Boomershooter (he was at the FIRST Boomershoot in 1998) Steve M. and the author of the article, Jack Lewis, I found out the March 2010 issue of Motorcyclist magazine has an article about a trip to Boomershoot 2009 from the Seattle area on a motorcycle with a sidecar--a 2WD Ural Safari.

It includes a lot of photos (by Shasta Wilson) and is a great story. It includes typical Boomershoot experiences like:

Bundling Pretty Wife into fuzzy blankets, I tossed two cased rifles across her chest and we were off.

"Don't worry, " I bellowed, "It won't rain in the mountains!"

It didn't rain. It snowed.

I bought out the entire supply of the issue at the newsstand in the lobby of the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, WA and they said they are unlikely to get any more in. The Barnes and Noble next door only had a couple of February issues when I checked on Sunday evening but if you check there now they might have one.

The article starts on page 70.

Via email from co-worker Chet.

Although I haven't heard any trainers directly address this it has been hinted at by some:

Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform "planned actions".

In an experimental "duel", published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they studied the speed of these two types of movement.

...

Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other. Each was secretly given instructions of how long to wait before pushing a row of buttons.

"There was no 'go' signal," said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research.

"All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent - just like in the gunslingers legend."

Those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.

During one or more of the classes I took from Insights Greg Hamilton told the students to "use your startle reflex" when the buzzer goes off to decrease your draw time. It works.

You can actually see it other shooters. New shooters take a lot longer to start moving their hand toward the gun and it moves slower when it does move. Tell them to use their "startle reflex" and after a few repetitions you will see their hands jerk into motion and reduce the amount of time required to get their gun deployed.

Apparently we have different pathways in the brain and we can consciously reroute the signals to decrease the time.

This strengthens the wisdom taught in NRA Personal Protection courses about "drawing a line". The students are told they must have a mental threshold past which they will take some sort of action. It might be something like "the door opens" when someone is trying to break into your safe room. Or "they come around the corner of the counter" when the bad guy is advancing at you with a knife. You are reacting to something the bad guy did. In addition to increasing the speed of your response to a threat you are less likely to suffer from a "boiled frog" situation where the situation escalates and you keep postponing your response because "it's not that bad" yet.

Update: See also the Scientific American podcast via Say Uncle.

Are you out of work and looking for a job. Would something gun related make it more fun to go to work each day?

The Brady Campaign is looking for someone.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and its legislative and grassroots affiliate, the Brady Campaign and its dedicated network of Million Mom March Chapters, is the nation's largest, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence. We are devoted to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in our communities. We are searching for spring interns to assist us in our Research and Messaging and Marketing Departments.

Interns with the Research Department choose a specific research project to complete during the course of the internship in addition to pitching in on administrative tasks related to research, public affairs, or fund-raising.
Examples of research projects include summarizing research for our website and for our monthly Brady Research Update, short reports (2-3 pages) that are part of our Gun Laws Make A Difference series, e. g. explaining the impacts of gun control laws in California, New York City, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada and other projects.

Oh, there is something you should know--it's an unpaid position. I guess working to infringe a specific enumerated right and risking prosecution for violation of 18 USC 241 doesn't pay as well as working toward preserving and enhancing that right.

But you could have some fun with it. Check out the projects you could work on. I have some pointers to help you get started. There is even a picture of a Glasgow Smile you can use.

I have cancellations for two positions at Boomershoot 2010. Both positions are on the Berm and will open tomorrow evening, January 26, at 6:00 PM PST (the same time as Gun Nuts Radio comes on).

The pictures for these positions may exaggerate the view of part of the tree-line (375 yards away). I extended the berm further to the left to make each position a little wider. I didn't notice it at that time but the view of the targets on the right is obstructed. I should have made the extension a little higher. You will be able to see about 1/3 of the tree-line targets and all of the hillside.

To sign up for a position visit http://entry.boomershoot.org/ tomorrow evening.

Update: Lots of changes are happening. Existing entrants have requesting positions swaps. I had another cancellation. A .50 caliber position is going to be dedicated to hourly use. Position #31 may be available as well as one Berm position.

I almost made the alt-text from XKCDs comic this morning (hover your mouse over the picture at that link) the QOTD.

Here is the comic itself:

[The Geeks With Guns website is here.]

I had been putting Ian off all week. Last week I told him Monday evening should work. I had forgotten about the previously made plans to have dinner with James and Kelsey.

I didn't even offer Tuesday because that was the evening Barb was showing up from Idaho.

Tentative plans were made for Wednesday but those were scrapped when some tentative plans for dinner with some friends I expected to fall through didn't.

Thursday I loaded up my car with over a thousand rounds of ammo, three handguns, a rifle, and some other gear. I parked off across the street (Microsoft doesn't allow guns on campus) and that evening Ian and I went to Wades where I have a lifetime membership.

I went over the NRA three safety rules and he asked some questions about the NRA. The answers amounted to a brief history of the NRA. and NRA-ILA.

As he filled out the new shooter paperwork I paid the guest fee and purchased a USPSA practice target.

I started him out on a Ruger Mark II at about three yards:

Then an Olympic Arms AR-15 at seven yards:

Then S&W .22 revolver at three yards:

Then my STI Eagle 5.2 chambered in .40 S&W at three yards:

This is his single action revolver results (the double action results were just as good):

But he did well with .40 S&W too (the smaller holes are from the AR-15 at seven yards):

This is at seven yards with the .40 S&W:

We picked up the brass and as we drove to his bus stop I explained the economics and custom load benefits of reloading. It was during the drive he said the words I made my QOTD.

Another day, another oppressed minority from another country liberated (see also representatives from China, Canada, India, and Taiwan).

I've been America three weeks and I've shot four different guns. This is so cool!

Ian
January 21, 2010
[Ian is from Toronto and is an intern at Microsoft. He said the above after going to the range, touching, and shooting a gun for the first time. Freedom is very cool.

Pictures to follow.--Joe]

Pullman Washington is just over the border from Moscow Idaho. Moscow has numerous stores that sell guns and used to have a few dedicated gun shops. It's down to one gun shop now but Pullman has zero stores that sell guns and only for a year or two had a gun shop. Who, Kevin I. says, "the city fathers chase him out".

This makes it a bit of a hassle for Pullman and surrounding residents to buy a handgun. It is illegal to go next door to Moscow and directly buy a handgun from someone in Moscow. You need to transfer the gun across state lines via a FFL. In this case it means a trip to Spokane--75 miles away. Just one more stupid infringement on our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

But that recently changed. We now have a FFL in Pullman again.

Palouse Operational Supply is now in town and FFL transfer are only $25.00 ($20.00 for law enforcement, fire, and military). They also provide quotes on whatever toy and accessory you have an interest in and promise "You won't find a better deal, period!" for some manufactures.

Five gets you ten his new company has nothing to do with fruity “LDA” triggers.

It must have been physically painful to have been contractually obligated to pimp those things.

Tam
January 21, 2010
Comment to Todd Jarrett Leaving ParaOrdnance.
[Similar, but far less succinct and articulate, thoughts went through my head when I read the news.--Joe]

A recent email from RivrDog contained the following:

The Rivrdog/Rockett Boomershoot camp (camped at #75/76) issues the following Challenge to those coming to this year's Boomershoot, INSTRUCTORS INCLUDED!

1. Pick any off-the-shelf HUNTING rifle out of your safe (or buy one, except no Fifties at this end of the range). Custom rifles OK, if they are custom HUNTING rifles. I'll have a scale, your rifle needs to weigh less than 10# to qualify, or you need to prove you actually tote that 17# monstrosity in the field and not just shoot it off a bench (photo of you with the elk and heavy rifle will do). I'll be firing a WIN70, myself.
2. Put any glass on it you desire.
3. Load/buy any ammo for it you desire (that doesn't conflict with Joe's rulz).
4. On Field Fire days/hours (Friday and Saturday), come on down to the Rivrdog/Rockett camp and use MY shooting table & rifle rests. The rests are elevation adjustable front and sandbag rear. Coordinate your rifle -moving to be legal during cease-fires.
5. Bring your spotter or go solo.
6. Fire 10 rounds, slow fire, at the right-end steel ON THE 380-YARD BERM. Number of hits on it is your score.

Winner receives a (new, sealed!) bottle of 12-year old Scotch, my choice (which guarantees it's quality!). As in war, no second place prizes. My guess is that it will take no less than a 9 to win, so put in some practice time. You likely will be shooting against some professionals. The steel will be about 2 MOA, if it's like last year. I may bring a 1 MOA steel for tiebreakers. Award ceremony after Field Fire/Cleanup on Saturday. I will take photos during the contest.

If I had the time that day I would show up with my 17.5 pound Spud Gun that I used the one and only season I went hunting (and got a deer). It can do this at 200 yards and hitting 2 MOA (about 8") at 375 yards is pretty easy if the wind isn't bad. I'd do it just to be pushing the envelope on the rules and winning, not because I'm interested in a bottle of Scotch. I've never tasted the stuff and am not particularly interested in trying. Besides I have two bottles of the stuff on the shelves (Xenia, you still have that one bottle, right?) given to me by friends that I haven't touched.

If you happen to think of some nifty addition to the proposal suggest it to RivrDog. This is his baby.

I'll probably get around to emailing this to all the participants sometime this weekend.

I guess I'll call them "PRRs" or "RRPs" (Rifle Receiver Pistols).  A few of us made comments over at at Say Uncle about the use of such pistols.  There was the assertion that Blackwater personnel have been using AK pistols out of vehicles.  I don't get it.  Here's my last comment;

A cut down, folding stock carbine I can see (AKS-74U et al) but I have yet to understand the allure of the "pistol" version (no shoulder stock at all).

"They became very common with Blackwater in Iraq."

You're not referring to a folder rather than a pistol?

Stateside, I see the rifle receiver pistol as a political creation (if it has a shoulder stock it falls under the NFA [as a short barreled rifle, or SBR]) rather than something that arose for a particular application.  Otherwise we'd be seeing handguns more along the lines of an Automag with 30 round mags, and/or the Tech 9 or some iteration thereof would be popular, which it isn't.

There must be something I don't understand.  Is it all about suppressive fire?  But in that case what's wrong with having a folding stock on there just in case you want to, you know, aim, or something?

Can anyone fill me in on the particulars?  Why an AK pistol, AR pistol, etc., other than the fact that the stocked version comes with the NFA hassles and tax for civilians?  I mean; why are such pistols desired for defense and/or in combat?  Or are they?

Even though I haven't gotten out of bed yet (aren't laptops great!) and have already made a couple of blog posts I have a very busy day ahead of me. In addition to the usual things like attending to hygiene, food, and clothing I need to make up a couple hundred rounds of .40 S&W and head out to the range for a USPSA action pistol match. After that I have to return to Redmond to help The Borg conquer the galaxy.

I turned off Captcha on the comments to help some people that were having problems with it. If you see a bunch of spam comments start showing up don't worry about it. I'll take care of them by tomorrow morning.

Update: The pistol match went fairly well. I messed up a reload on one stage or else I might have actually won. I came in second instead:

We started sitting in the chair and had to stay within the box. There is a Pepper Popper on the left in the shadow of a no shoot which activates a swinging target coming out from behind the stack of barrels on the right (simulates a hijacker come out of the bathroom).

I got 50 points (out of 55 possible--an 11 round stage) in 8.31 seconds for a hit factor of 6.0168. Pretty good, I figure, for almost all head shots except for the mover. Especially with all the hostages to avoid.

That white stuff on the ground? That is snow. SOME wimps stop shooting outdoors in the winter--but not at our range in North Central Idaho.

Via email from MD Creekmore I received a link to this list of survival related materials. It all seems to be pretty straight forward and obvious stuff. I found the headings on the "Survival Guns" list somewhat amusing:

I work at Wal-Mart Arsenal

1. Mosin Nagant 91 rifle
2. Single Shot .12 gauge
3. Smith&Wesson model 10

The Government Welfare Arsenal

1. Short Magazine Lee-Enfield
2. Mossberg Maverick 88 12 gauge pump
3. Smith&Wesson model 10
4. Ruger 10/22

I have a full time Job Arsenal

1. Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle or AR-15
2. Mossberg 500 12 Gauge
3. Glock Model 19
4. Ruger 10/22

Two Jobs and Maxed Credit Card Arsenal

1. Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle or AR-15
2. Remington 870 express with spare riot barrel
3. Glock 19
4. Ruger 10/22
5. Winchester Model 70 in .308 Win.
6. Taurus CIA Model 850 .38 SPL. Revolver

And Finally the Yuppie Survival Arsenal

1. L1A1 Rifle chambered in .308 Winchester
2. Remington Model 7 bolt action chambered in .223
3. Winchester Model 70 in 308 Win.
4. Remington 870 express with spare riot gun barrel
5. Colt 1911 A1 .45 ACP
6. Taurus CIA Model 850 .38 SPL. Revolver
7. Savage Model 24F .223 Remington over 12 gauge (if you can find one used)
8. Ruger 10/22

I do question the need for both a revolver and a semi-auto pistol when both perform essentially the same in terminal ballistics, range, concealability, portability, and availability of ammo.

Also of possible interest is that if you are in the Seattle or Moscow Idaho area I can get you wheat, lentils, and split peas in large quantities cheaper than you can find it almost anywhere else. People attending Boomershoot can arrange for pick up at that time as well. Send me an email with the commodities and quantities you are interested in. The smallest unit I'm interested dealing in would be 50 pounds of any one item.

Via the WA CCW email list I found out a firearms related company in Greensboro North Carolina is looking for a new PM:

As a strategic leader within the organization, the Director of Product Management is required to manage and insure the profitability and competitive positioning of firearms products within the assigned category in the commercial sporting goods market, and to act as a steward to insure the long-term effectiveness of firearms products by performing the following duties personally or through subordinate supervisors. This position is responsible for understanding the target market and keeping the product line competitive on both price and features with key responsibility for the profitability of the product line. The ability to develop and produce strategic planning documents is required. Must be able to understand financial reporting and prepare and explain financial analysis to measure project performance. Must be able to prepare and deliver presentation materials to senior level management. Must have a solid understanding and grasp of technical concepts as they relate to product design and manufacturing. Requires 30%-40% domestic travel and some international travel may be required.

I wonder who it is. Para-USA is in Pineville NC but they are 100 miles away and doesn't have the position listed on their website.

A couple months ago I mentioned a had a problem with two new magazines dropping out of my STI. Today I finally got around to fixing it.

I had measured the magazines and found they were 0.020" narrower than the magazines that worked. It had to be the magazine release. So I bought a new magazine release (on the left below) and compared it to the old one (on the right).

Near the top of the picture compare the width of the material for the little "ledge". The old one is much narrower. That is what engages the magazine. The old one is worn enough that it does not fully engage the magazine.

I replaced the release, took the gun and magazines to the range and put a couple hundred rounds through the gun without any problems other than one of my old magazines failing to lock the slide back on the last round. Yeah, I know the magazine followers are worn out. I'll order some new ones and replace them soon. But that is a minor problem compared to the magazines falling out on the first shot.

I'll do more field testing at the steel match tomorrow but I fully expect the magazine drop problem is fixed now.

From Joe D. on the Lewiston Pistol Club discussion email list:

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays everyone.

Details on the Boomershoot 2010 Precision Rifle Clinic are now available. You don't have to participate in the main event to get coaching and shoot in the clinic.

The clinic fills up every year and Gene has lots of repeat attendees so you know people are getting their money's worth.

Sign up and learn how to turn money and time into earth shaking noise and smoke.

As a side note, Boomershoot statistics are here. Probably most interesting is that there are 110 participants and we have 11 bloggers-exactly 10%.

We will be having a blogger/media day again on Thursday April 22^nd.

You knew he wasn't going to let us gun owners get off easy, right? Things have been going more than a little too smoothly.

Here's the scoop on the real plan:

Gun rights supporters have been shocked by the release of an internal campaign memo showing Obama planned to restrict gun access through fear and free market principles. The memo, drawn up in early 2008 with the help of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, speculated that Obama's election would lead to a hording of guns and ammunition that would raise prices.

...

"The people going out and spending thousands of dollars on guns right now aren't the smartest and will spend beyond their means. We'll see them have to hock their guns and ammo for food and soon we'll be flooded with guns. This short term stimulus will come at a cost our children and grandchildren will have to bear," claims the Brady Campaign, an anti-gun organization.

Sources inside the Obama administration say that a "Cash for Carbines" program was in the works. Unlike the previous "Cash for Clunkers", it would simply use the gun buyback model to pay $40-$100 for guns that cost several times more, without encouraging buying more guns.

"We expect a "gun bubble" where prices crash after the market is saturated and gun owners put themselves deeply in debt. We'll swoop in and offer to buy back the guns. With current credit card interest rates and payment schedules we expect more guns turned in than were bought, making for a net drop in total guns," the source said.

The program would also include a "Cash for Cartridges" option where ammo could be bought cheap and distributed to police to ease the high cost of ammunition.

I have my doubts that Obama knows what the free market is, let alone is capable of using it to his advantage.

There is a conspiracy theorist for every data point--and almost as many satirists.

STI is going to be making a limited (200 pieces) run of one of their pistols for their 20th Anniversary. It will have a finish that many will consider too pretty to actually shoot:

TriTop slide with diamond LPI on top, decorative cuts on the dust cover, new STI 20th Anniversary serrations, STI presentation box, gold Titanium Nitride slide with Ion Bond black PVD frame and gold TiN and PVD'd exterior parts including the barrel.

They are taking orders now.

I shoot a STI gun in competition, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

It Was a Bright and Calm Morning...

My son and I both decided to hunt Late Muzzleloader season this year for a simple reason-- there are far more does and "antlerless" bucks in our little hunting spot than antlered bucks, and this season allows harvesting of "three point minimum or antlerless" white tail deer.  Hunting muzzleloader season gives us a high probability of harvesting deer within walking distance of home.

We have one functioning muzzleloader rifle (step one food processor) so Son was given the first watch at the tree stand.  The second time out he took a decent young buck (small nubs for antlers) on Thanksgiving Day.  He spotted it while climbing down the tree, and shot it with the rifle still tied to the cord we use for raising and lowering things from the stand.  After that I started going out to the stand, but saw nothing in several days.  That's unusual, but a deer had just been taken right there by Son.  Maybe they're a bit spooked.  Don't know, but on the morning of the last day of this one-week season, I got tired of sitting in the stand (besides, it was cold) and decided to take a walk.

It was a beautiful morning, just after sunrise, so if I never got a deer, it would still be worth the nice walk along the top of the picturesque basalt cliffs above the Palouse River.  There are always a lot of deer tracks up there, as it's their only option for traveling between their feeding grounds (farmer's fields) and their primary source of water.  My trouble that morning was that if there were any deer, they'd be immediately alerted to my presence.  Every 50 yards or so as I was walking along the ridge, a pheasant or two, or about 50 quail, would explode up from near my feet.  I might as well have been blowing an air horn every 50 yards and carrying a boom box playing rap music.

There's a place along that ridge that's down in a depression, and has some flat land with 360 degree concealment.  I knew in advance that if I was going to see a deer along the ridge away from our tree stand, it would likely be there.  As I topped the rise, getting ready to look down into the depression, I went slowly, making no sudden movements.

Sure enough, there were two deer, and one of them was a very nice eight-point buck!  About 200 yards away, he's looking in my direction.  The sun being directly behind me, I was casting a 100 yard-long shadow right in his direction.  Pure stealth isn't much of an option, but I was moving very slowly so as not to alert them too much.  Whack-a-Whack-a-Thump-a-Thump-a-Thump!!!  A pheasant exploded up at that moment about six feet away from me, so the buck got real nervous and trotted away.  It's been years since I saw a nice buck up there, and, aware of my presence, this one and the doe are now on the move away from me.  Oh well. (but they didn't bolt, as often happens)

I can either back-track less than a mile, cross the bridge for home and get ready to go to work, or I can go on, crossing another bridge about a mile ahead.  That's an easy choice-- I keep going forward in the direction of those two deer.  Wham, Slam, Whack!-- quail and pheasants continue to announce my presence.  This is getting hopeless.  But it's sure a nice day for a walk.

The deer never panicked, I guess, so what ended up happening was that I was dogging them.  They'd put some distance between us,  I'd close in, and they'd make some more distance.  Repeat.  Eventually they made a wrong move.  Some more quail (announcing my presence, but not telling exactly where) must have startled them out of the thick brush and into the open field.

I did not expect that.  They were in range, barely, but moving away fast.  Too far away to attempt a shot on a moving target.  No shot.  What do you do in this situation?  I whistled.  Deer whistle (I guess it's more of a fast hiss than a whistle) at each other as an alert message.  Anyhow, it worked.  They stopped, turned 90 degrees broadside and looked back at me.  From that moment, circumstances dictate action.  No time for kneeling, and that might scare them off, so standing it is.  We're all in the open.  Lock to full cock.  Backstop?  Check (there's a hill a couple hundred yards behind them).  Front sight.  This is a longish shot for this weapon with open sights from standing-- about 80 to 90 yards (I've never fired this rifle at anything more than 100 yards distant - maybe that has to change, but I'm confident at 100 and this is a bit less).  Some vacillating takes place for about a second.  One shot, one chance.  Too far?  Wobble area looks good.  Too far?  They're still standing there, stone still.  This is a hair trigger.  Sight's right on the sweet spot, what’re you waiting for?  Too far?  Nope.  Bang!

The two deer took off running.  The usual question comes to mind; did I miss?  They're running fast and far.  200 yards and they're out of sight over a rise in the undulating fields.  Oh well.  It's a nice day for a walk.  Should I reload?  Maybe.  Have to cover 200 yards to look over that rise and try to spot them.  Better do that.  There they are; waaaay out there and still running.  I must have missed, though the let-off felt fine.  Damn.  But wait.  The doe's way ahead of the buck.  Buck slows down and stops.  Then he looks like he got tired and decided to have a little lie down.  That's odd.  They only ran about 1,000 yards.  No, it can only mean I got him.

He's lying down with his head up.  Better reload.  I carry two reloads-- plastic cartridges that contain a measure of black powder, a ball with lubricated patch, and a percussion cap.  They're nice because you can use the cartridge structure as a short ball starter.  It's easy-- you just place the ball end over the muzzle and smack the other end, like so... Oops!  Forgot to pour the powder in first.  I have just dry-balled the gun and there's an injured buck (I don't know how injured) down there.  He could get up and run away.  I could lose an injured deer.  This sucks.  My chosen method of removing a dry ball is to seat the ball all the way down, remove the nipple and trickle a few grains of powder through the flash channel into the breech chamber, cap, then fire.  Works like a charm.  I have no nipple wrench.  Who needs to remove a nipple in the field on a half-day hunt? (it's coming with me from now on)  The nipple's seated tight-- can't break it free with the Leatherman tool.  Damn, damn, damn.  I eventually was able to pry the ball out at the muzzle, using the awl accessory (if I'd rammed it down I'd be hosed).  Cool.  Didn't scratch the muzzle 'cause the patch protected it.  That ball is toast, but I have one more reload.

Meanwhile, the buck is lying there, looking around...head up, head down, head up, head down again.  Did he die?  Head comes back up.  Crap.  I had to get close enough for a 100% sure CNS (Central Nervous System) shot.  Walk slowly.  40 yards, take aim.  No.  Why not get closer?  30 Yards, kneel, full cock, put a shot through the neck at the base of the skull.  He drops like a stone.

This is not a good place from which to pack out a large deer.  Good net coverage.  Kamiak Butte, with the cell towers, is only 6 miles to the southwest.  I call Son on the phone.  No answer.  I wait and call again.  No answer.  I call my wife-- she should be getting ready to drive to school.  Maybe she can meet me on the Colfax highway a few hundred yards over a hill and bring me home to get the pickup.  No answer.  I'd also been dogging a coyote along the way, and I'd seen the 'yote running along the same path as the deer.  Can't gut this buck yet.  That's just inviting that 'yote in to come and mess up my deer while I'm gone.  Leave it whole.  I walk a couple miles home, get Son out of bed and drive back to the Colfax highway.  We get permission to drive over a planted field to the deer.  No dice.  The frozen mud had thawed enough at the surface that a 4x4 with studded snows can't get a grip to climb over the hill.  We're on foot.  We go back home to grab a saw and a sled.

Below; the buck fell about a 1,000 yards from where he was hit, which was out of the frame to the upper right.

Looking closely, I find an entry wound in the deer's left hind quarter.  Odd.  I could have sworn he was broadside to me when the gun fired, and I know I didn't pull the shot that much.  And there's a ball, just under the skin behind the right shoulder, exactly opposite where I was aiming, but I can't find a corresponding entry wound.  Oh well, I'll find it when I skin the carcass.  Someone else must have shot this deer before me, which would explain the entry wound in the hip.  That's plausible, since I've been hearing shots in the area all week.  Weird.

Hours later we had the big buck hanging in the garage after getting the workout of the year.  Man, this hunting business is getting more like hard work.  After gutting (in the field) and skinning the deer (in the garage) there was only the one entry wound to be found.  The ball had struck the left "ham" at a shallow angle, passed through the intestines doing very little damage, passed through the stomach, blew a three-finger-sized ragged hole through the liver, punctured the diaphragm, punctured a lung, glanced off a rib and stopped just short of exiting the hide on the right side.  I measured 25 inches of penetration, from a ~180 grain round ball that left the muzzle at ~1,920 fps.  That deer ran about a thousand yards with all that damage.

My best guess is that the buck was all wound up tight, having spotted me, knowing that I'd been following him.  The cow-sized cloud of backlit, white smoke that erupted at extra-sonic speed from the muzzle must have made him jump slightly, changing the angle of impact from broadside to less than 45 degrees.  I calculate he had about a quarter second to move from the emergence of the smoke cloud.  I dunno.  Maybe he wasn't so fully broadside to begin with as I'd thought.  The "act of grace" neck shot did not penetrate more than three inches, but shattered the vertebra.

Here's one reason to have children.  They can pull your sled;

Observations on penetration and "stopping power"
Starting last season, we've shot three deer with the same exact load from the same muzzleloading rifle.  The first shot penetrated an adult whitetail fully, straight through the ribcage, severing a rib fully on each side, from <30 yards.  The same shot from Son hit a smaller deer broadside through the ribs, hit the heart and blew it completely apart, such that you could lay it out like a pancake, and did not exit the hide on the far side.  Less than 14 inches penetration.  Hitting the big buck in the heavy hip muscle from almost three times the distance, the ball went through 25 inches of animal, and the second ball (on the buck's neck) was demolished after about three inches.  The same load (110 grains of Old Black pushing a ~180 grain .495" round ball) penetrated between 3 and 25 inches (a factor of 8.33) depending on shot placement.  Sort of makes you wonder about penetration figures given for defense loads.  It all depends and what's being penetrated, from hide, to muscle, to the liquid chambers inside the heart, to lung and liver tissue that doesn't explode like that heart did.  And stopping power?  Each one of these deer was hit with a 100% lethal shot, and they ran from eighty to one thousand yards after being hit.

We've had similar "stopping power" experiences using modern rifles, but never has a modern rifle load failed to penetrate completely, regardless of what it hit inside.  I've been wondering whether the stories of recovered, modern hunting rifle bullets are just mythology, but if the differences in penetration can be so great with the muzzleloader they must be fairly large with modern systems too.

(With that I think I’ve outdone myself—- 2,000+ words.  It’s my first nice buck.  Can’t I prattle on and on about it?)

Below; Along the bottom, near that ditch behind the small rise is where the buck fell.  Kamiak Butte is in the distance, top right in the frame.

Below; this .495" (well, formerly .495") lead ball traveled 25 inches into the animal.  I'd not believe it if I hadn't seen it.  I bet I could load it again and kill another deer with it next year.

From various email lists:

Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 10:39 AM
To: 2ndamendmentrights@yahoogroups.com; wa-guns@yahoogroups.com
Cc: nrainstructorsrkba@yahoogroups.com; rkba@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [wa-guns] become an NRA instructor (nra.idw)

One of the ways that the control nuts advance their agenda is by working the problem from all angles, it's something we could do more of -and- it is tremendously effective. You don't have to be on the streets with signs and OC (although, that's one way to go) to show people the importance of restoring our freedom. One way you can do it in the second amendment arena is to simply go out and teach people about guns.

The safest, most effective and most fun way to do that is as a certified NRA instructor; as part of an instructor team. If you're curious about it I would be glad to answer any questions I can. It's something I've been enjoying for about ten years now. You -may not- discuss politics during class but you don't need to, the people there are seeing you lead by example. Which makes a nice contrast to the folks at Brady campaign in every way imaginable.

If you know any proficient shooters in the NW I'd appreciate you letting them know about this and about the NRA instructor development workshop that will be held at Kenmore range (Wa) January 15th to the 17th. Some details are here: ( http://www.wcwinc.org/club/educ4.htm ) or just email me any questions you have. Information/location of NRA instructor classes nationally can be found at: http://www.nrahq.org/EDUCATION/Training/instructor.asp

-Boyd Kneeland EVC wa-08, NRA TC, EKC Friends of NRA committee etc (working as many angles for freedom as family and work life allows...)

Boyd's email address is "boyd AT seanet.com"

I got a chance to use my STI in competition again today. It had broken and I had been whining about being less than happy with both of my competition guns.

At a Steel Challenge match today my STI Eagle performed flawlessly and most of the time I did my part properly too. I placed second:

Bold Cells denote stage winner.

Yeah. I know. Some of the best competitor stayed away because of the snow and cold but I figure that makes them losers anyway.

My first chronograph was something I bought about 15 years ago from an estate sale and it was old then. It died a couple years ago and the new one I bought was a CED Millennium. Because there were times in which the light started getting low that I had problems getting readings with my old chronograph I splurged and got the Infrared Screen Set with the new unit. Today I was glad I did.

I had used the IR screens  in near total darkness just to test them and got good results. But today it was just very dark and cloudy from the snow storm coming in. I put 10 rounds from my .40 S&W over the screens and got good readings but when I tried a .22 LR there was nothing. Rats! I really wanted those numbers too. I have been thinking there is something I could try to make Boomerite a little more sensitive and the normal .22 LR ammo I use for testing (CCI Stingers) hasn't been in any of the local stores (I now see it is available some places on-line). I wanted data on some other ammo to see if I could replace the Stingers. CCI Velocitor was the prime candidate and I didn't want to make another trip to the range or waste time getting chronograph data at the Boomershoot site.

I got out the inverter (every vehicle should have one), plugged in the IR screens, and every shot recorded a velocity.

I'm now very happy with the chronograph and IR screens.

In my rifle the Stingers clock in with muzzle velocities of about 1605 fps and the Velocitors at about 1320 fps. But from looking at my notes it appears that the Velocitors should detonate the targets at 25 yards even though they are quite a bit slower than the Stingers.

We've wanted to design an optic mount for the M1 Garand rifle for years, and people have been asking us for one, but it always seemed like there was something else we had to do.  Well, here's our M1 rifle optic mount prototype.  I think it's going to be designated the M12 optic mount.  You saw it here first.

I don't know how many people have told me that their "old eyes" can't make use of the iron sights like they use to, or that it would sure be nice to have a simple way to mount a scout scope or dot sight on a Garand, etc., but it's been a lot.

If you're not familiar with the M1 rifle, it has to be loaded from the top, and when the clip of ammo you shove into the magazine runs empty, the clip is ejected forcefully out the top when the last shot is fired.  That means you can't put an optic over the top of the receiver, 'cause it gets in the way of loading and ejection.  Some M1 rifles were used with scopes mounted off to the left side, but few people like that arrangement.  It works, but you need a special mount and I understand you have to drill the receiver on your classic rifle, plus your manual clip eject button ("clip latch") is there on the left side.

This new mount replaces the handguard just in front of the receiver, clamping solid to the barrel with steel clamps and screws similar to the UltiMAK M8 for the M-14 rifle.  This is the prototype, and is left "in the white".  The production units will be anodized and finished in black.  It sits low enough to co witness (use the iron sights without removing the optic, right through the optic, in case the dot fails) with most tubular dot sights which also means you need no comb riser to get a decent cheekweld.  On this example (a vintage Springfield war horse - Thanks Mr. Devoe) I can center the dot in the Aimpoint Micro, with the rear iron sight all the way down hard, and the rear aperture is completely out of the way, yet I can still aim with the irons if I want.  It's as if the rifle, mount and Micro sight were all made for each other.  That's the way we like it.

[shameless self promotion = "off"]

I'm not putting it on our web site just yet, because we have more tweaking to do, and a lot of other things before it goes into production.  This post is just what the title says.

The M1 rifle is fascinating for several reasons.  One reason is that the gas port in the barrel (where high pressure gas is bled off to operate the action) is right near the muzzle, under the front sight, so the operating rod goes full length form the charging handle to the front sight.  We were talking here the other day about how much machining went into one of these rifle, and how many were made in a short time.  Amazing.  Its design led to a whole family of long guns, including the M-14, M1A, Mini-14, Mini-30, and the M1 Carbine shares some things in common with it.  Back in the day the M1 was state of the art, but today it would be considered on the high end of heavy for a battle rifle, it holds a small number of rounds in the magazine, doesn't lend itself to "tactical reloads" very well, but it sure is a lot of fun, and its .30-06 cartridge packs a punch.  And look how pretty it is.  Just..just look at it.

This is the broken link on my STI Eagle 5.1 that I was whining about a few days ago:

It has been replaced and the gun is back on my hip. I'll take it to the range on Wednesday evening.

A guy at work, Chet, frequently stops by my office to take a break and talk about, among other things, the state of our economy. Are we going to have hyper inflation? Deflation? Should savings be put into stocks, bonds, precious metals?

I bought a few ounces of gold and silver in the late 1990s and that turns out to have been a fairly good investment. But as Chet points out, "You can't eat it."

If being able to eat it were the sole criteria for sound investing then a few tons of lentils, peas, and wheat from the farm be a good idea but my bunker can only store so many sacks before it starts getting in the way. And I'm pretty sure some of the sacks of food I sold to people worried about Y2K in 1999 (about 20,000 pounds total) are still in their closets unopened except perhaps by rodents and insects. The food stores fairly well but unless you were very careful how you stored after ten years it has noticeably degraded.

Dave Hardy points out there is an alternative to gold that is useful (I don't recommend eating it however) and which has retained it's value every bit as well as gold has for the last 136 years. When I bought my first gun the guy I bought it from pointed out that guns in good repair don't loose significant value over the years. Even that SKS you bought for $65 back in the early 1990s kept pace with inflation. Ammo too has been a good investment.

So perhaps that is Chet's answer. Instead of precious metals like gold and silver invest in steel, copper, brass and lead with a little bit of nitrocellulose thrown in.

Two weeks ago I shot in a Steel Challenge match with the Lewiston Pistol Club. Nice match, nice people.

I shot both my Gun Blog 45 and my STI Eagle. Twice the fun for the same investment of time. But there were problems.

I had recently got my STI back from being worked on. While it was gone I had been using my Gun Blog 45 and had practiced with it enough that I seldom hit the bugs with the stupid LDA trigger.

With the STI back I shot it for practice and then tried to shoot both guns in the steel match.

About 10 or 20% of the time I used the Gun Blog 45 I would try and take the thumb safety off at the same time I was prepping the trigger after the draw. This resulted in the trigger going all the way to the rear without anything happening. It would take another 0.5 seconds (yes, I got the first shot times back from the R.O., I had a bimodal distribution of first shot times: ~1.5 and ~2.0 seconds). Other times when I was prepping the trigger for the next shot I would over prep and fire a shot prior to when I really wanted it to shoot. The long LDA trigger pull is tough for me to shoot rapidly.

Fine. I'm done with this gun. I'll clean and oil it and put it away. It's a nice memento of the Gun Blogger Summer Camp but I don't like shooting it.

The STI shot well but one of the brand new magazines I purchased after shooting a hole in a magazine last May, which worked fine before I had the gun worked on, would drop out of the gun on the first shot. The first time I thought it was because I hadn't seated it correctly or something. The second time I put the magazine away for later study. After the match I discovered that both of the new magazines would do that. One after just racking the slide. Okay. I'll need to look at this closely and figure out what is going wrong.

That night I cleaned the Gun Blog 45 and carefully packed it away. Figuring I would only get it out for teaching and new shooters that wanted to try a .45. I was done with it.

I then cleaned the STI and discovered the link from the barrel to the frame had a crack in it. I have fired about 300 rounds after getting it back from the factory and it has to go back to the shop for another repair. And that means I'm carrying the Gun Blog 45 for self-defense until I get the STI back.

I put 30K rounds through my $300 (in 1994) Ruger P-89 with only one trip to the factory for repair and it only misbehaved when I used non-factory magazines, crappy Egyptian military surplus ammo, or it was extremely dirty. The $2000 STI has had numerous repairs with about the same number of rounds through it and the Gun Blog 45 has the paint wearing off and the LDA trigger is a piece of crap.

Sometimes I hate my guns.

So maybe I'm an idiot.  I was out firing a Colt AR-15 HBAR with a Trijicon ACOG scope.  I'd gone the extra step and drilled through the A2 carry handle on this otherwise pristine Colt so as to add the second mounting screw for the scope.  The BDC (Bullet Drop Compensating) reticle has different crosshairs for elevation at different ranges (wind is of course still up to your doping skills).  You zero at, say, 100 using the main crosshair, and your elevation is supposed to be correct at all the other indicated distances.  One comment on that; it would be much better to refine your zero at greater distances, using that other crosshair, say, at 500 using the number 5 crosshair or etc.

Out in the real world though, your targets aren't placed at nice, even, measured distances, so it gets just a little bit more complicated.  I'd brought a laser with me to do range measurements.  The laser registered a particular target at 385 yards.  Said right there, so it couldn't be wrong, "385 yd".  That's close enough to 400 that I opt for the number 4 crosshair.  Shot went high.  "Not possible-- I called that shot dead on."  Same thing again.  Walking the shots onto the target, I find I have to hold halfway between the number 3 and 4 crosshairs*.  "Crap.  This shouldn't be happening.  I have nigh on three grand worth of equipment in top condition, the right ammo, and a standard length barrel.  What the hell?"

Some of you will already have figured out the problem (I seem to recall something about an interplanetary probe oblitorating itself on Mars due to a similar error).  The ACOG scope is calibrated in meters and the laser was set to display in yards.  A yard is 0.9144 meters.  In realistic rifle shooting distances, we can simplify that to either adding or subtracting 10% to do the conversion in our heads, and be close enough.  At 385 yards I was rounding up to 400, which made sense, but I was still thinking all in yards.  I didn't convert.  385 - 10% (simplify further and subtract 38) =  about 347 meters, or close enough to the 350 meter crosshair for this target.  *Ah Hah!

Better yet would have been to take all of half a minute (only because I don't mess with the settings much and I'd have had to take that long to figure it out) to set the laser to read in meters.

On a nice, relaxing day with a full belly and a Thermos-full of hot coffee (as backup this time) the sun shining and the birds chirping among the beautiful North Idaho scenery, this was more of an amusing lesson than anything serious.  If there is ever a situation in which it really matters, you'll want to be aware of these things in advance, and have taken the necessary steps already.

Part of my problem is that I fool around with so many different weapon systems, in addition to being an idiot.  How does that saying go?  "Beware the man with only one gun."  Something like that.  He knows his weapon backwards and forwards, right and left, upside down and every which way, in the dark, summer and winter, and with one hand tied behind his back just to make if fair he'll still kick your ass.  Hmm.  Maybe there's a new IPSC stage in there somewhere.

Update: With the low recoil of the 5.56 round and a low power optic, you can usually spot your own hits even at longer distances.  Take that for what it's worth.

Barb and I just finished watching the TV series The Unit. We really enjoyed it.

The gun handling and shooting was way above average. They shot around corners correctly, they cleared rooms correctly, they got hits at ranges in times that could be expected from expert shooters.

Barb loves to predict the outcome of any movie or show she watches. Who is going to be the bad guy? How are they going to get out of this predicament?

She is very good at it. So good that our kids tell her to shut up just as soon as her mouth starts to open. I don't mind and frequently play the game as well. Barb was frequently stumped. The writers were very good and we enjoyed the show being unpredictable without "angels flying out of their ass" to save the day. The solutions to the problems the characters faced were nearly always innovative and believable.

It was also very cool that the operatives/shooters wives were a big part of the stories they told. I was afraid that Barb wouldn't care for the show and I would end up watching it alone but the inclusion of the wives side of the drama made a big difference and did not detract from my enjoyment of the show.

There were occasionally things that bugged me about it however. Ironically the biggest was the item that got me to start watching it to begin with.

I had lunch with a friend a few months ago and he asked if it was true that putting mercury in a bullet would cause it to completely disintegrate upon impact because he had seen in on the show. I told him I would have to watch the show to be certain but it probably was just reusing an old plot device.

As near as I can tell the mercury bullet thing first came from the novel The Day of the Jackal (1971) by Frederick Forsyth. I read the book shortly after it came out and was fascinated, as many people are, by the mercury filled bullets. It's a great plot device but as near as I can determine pointless.

First off it's going to be really tough to make the bullet accurate with a liquid moving around inside the bullet. Second, we already have rifle bullets that can, essentially, explode upon impact. Why do you think Speer calls their varmint bullets TNT?

The TNT bullets are only rated at 3100 fps because, according to the manual, they are likely to "explode" before reaching the target if you push them faster than that. I bought some .30 caliber 125 grain TNT "seconds" (the factory is in nearby Lewiston Idaho and they sometimes sell cosmetically defective bullets in bulk to the local gun shops) for breaking in the barrel of my .300 Win Mag. Yeah, isn't that a real kick? Using a 125 grain varmint bullets in .300 Win Mag.

The 3100 fps limit specified didn't really make sense to me. I would have expected a rotational rate limit rather than a velocity rate and I sent a customer service guy I knew at Speer an email. He confirmed what I suspected. It really was a rotational issue. 3100 fps assumed the normal 1:10 twist barrels. But I have a 1:11 twist. Which means I could push them faster. Furthermore he told me that it also assumed a normal hunting type barrel where the rifling was fairly sharp and engraved, and weakened, the bullet jacket considerably. Many match grade barrels resulted in a less compromised jacket and hence you could push the bullets even faster without having them go "poof" on the way to the target. My calculations indicated I should be able to get at least 3400 fps out of them. Cool! Imagine what those bullets are going to do with they hit something.

I decided to use the bullets for something more than breaking in the barrel. I coated my bullets with moly to further reduce the engraving of the jacket by the rifling and began working up a load.

According to my references the min and max loads of Varget for 125 grain bullets in .300 Win Mag are 65 and 70 grains. I worked my way up to the max loads without any signs of excessive pressure. On the range the chronograph told me I was getting a mean muzzle velocity of 3497 fps using the max load. Occasionally one of the bullets won't make it to the target but that's a bit rare. Tests on milk jugs filled with water with a tarp underneath and around them to aid in collecting the pieces confirmed that the bullet essentially disappeared into a collection of lead sand upon impact and the jug behind it would only get a small "puncture wound" from the base of the jacket. The main part of the jacket was torn to shreds and no piece, other than the jacket base, was larger than about 0.1 inches in any dimension.

I use factory loaded 50 grain VMAX bullets in my AR-15 from Black Hills with similar results.

Mercury filled bullets? Why? Because it's a cool plot device.

As strongly as the U.K. is politically opposed to guns in the hands of private citizens it sometimes seems they have a fascination with people in the U.S. having guns. Here is an example:

Debbie Ferns travels the USA organising "Ladies Only Gun Camps" complete with pink weapons to encourage women to take up shooting.

Mrs Ferns, 55, from Tucson, Arizona, has also written a book called Babes with Bullets, Women Having Fun With Guns.

"Every woman in America should shoot a gun," said Mrs Ferns, who has more than 20 in her home collection.

She added "As long as the woman is a legal and law-abiding citizen I feel they should at least have a basic education in firearms safety."

The three-day camps, which cost £400, are exploding across the country and in January next year a US TV show will begin documenting the female gun trend.

"It started with one camp in 2004 and now we're planning 15 to 20 camps for 2010," said Debbie, who has helped recruit over 1,000 women to the shooting world.

"Women love it. We get schoolteachers, lawyers, nurses, women from all walks of life.

"They come in as novices and go away with a brand new skill using a powerful tool.

"Quite often they make new lifelong friends at camp as well."

The women-only gun camps are particularly popular with women over the age of 35, up to those in their 60s.

"We have so much fun and it's very exciting.

"It's a fast paced program and by the third day of camp we have women safely drawing from holsters and shooting on the move," said Mrs Ferns. "We often get emails from women telling us that the camp has changed their lives."

There's more and it is a very positive article. I have to wonder what that means for the future of gun ownership in the U.K. Is it an indicator of change for their firearm bans?

I love Annie Oakley. So much.
 ...
I hope I grow up to be that cool.

Laurel
October 26, 2009
This may be the coolest thing I've ever seen.
[And I think it's pretty cool there are women like Laurel as my neighbor in Moscow, Idaho.--Joe]

Say Uncle has a link to a video on how to make a fireball shooter. How cute!

But that's not a fireball. This is a fireball:

That is daughter Kim visible in the video. Her cousin Lacy, off screen, provides most of the extra sound effects.

I've often wondered how many rounds per year of ammo we go through in the U.S. Some say about nine billion others say about five billion as of 1992. Some say the world wide production is only 14 billion. Yet CCI (Lewiston Idaho) says they alone are going to produce more than six billion this year.

Six billion bullets in one year from just one company. Do you want to compute the odds on how safe bullets are compared to cars, swimming pools, and ladders? It's beyond astronomical, it's governmental*.

I took two people to the range with me tonight.

Gang is one of my co-workers. He is from the People's Republic of China. He had some military training when he was still living there but he only fired eight rounds total from an SKS. He went shooting with some friends in the U.S. once quite a while back. He doesn't qualify as a "new shooter" but he is still a beginner. He told me he would like to try it again sometime and I, of course, was pleased to take him to the local range. He said his father-in-law was visiting from China and would like to go along too if that was okay with me. FIL had never fired a gun before. He had field-stripped one in training but had never fired it.

Gang bought me dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. I went through the safety rules with Gang translating for his FIL. I told him which guns I had brought and Gang asked if they all fit in the car. I said there was plenty of room but I was carrying one with me there in the restaurant. They didn't seem surprised or concerned.

When we got to the range I then had them do some dry firing with the .22 revolver. I worked with them on the grip, stance, sight alignment, and trigger control. First using the gun in single action, then double action.

Here is FIL cocking the gun in preparation to fire his first actual shot:

Here is the result of his first eight rounds from about 10 feet away:

I was impressed! I know people who have put many hundreds of rounds down range and can't shoot that well. Gang's efforts were similar but offset to the right and up of the bullseye about the same amount as FILs were down and to the left.

I then rented a Ruger Mark III/45 since my Ruger Mark II is still with daughter Kim in Idaho. Here FIL is punching holes in the target with the semi-auto:

I fired a few rounds with my STI to make sure it didn't go full-auto on me after getting it's new NP3 finish before letting them try it.

They both fired it a few times then I loaded up the Gun Blog 45 for them. The loads were 230 grain bullets but downloaded to a Power Factor of only 175 (typical is about 200). Here the FIL is just getting the gun out of recoil with the slide still not closed:

They said the .45 hurt their hands a little bit but they had big smiles on their faces after shooting a few rounds each:

Next came the Evil Black Rifle:

Success! The target below has holes from both FIL and Gang from about 20 feet away. Each of them had one go low and the rest in a tight group in the middle of the A-Zone. FIL put his three on the lower left of the A-Zone with Gang having the upper three.

As I watched them shoot I keep thinking of Tiananmen Square and wondered how things might have been different had the civilians been armed and able to defend themselves. Gang, his wife, (and perhaps FIL), and daughter will be attending a private Boomershoot party next spring. After learning how to use guns of course they need to learn how to make explosives.

I've now taken new shooters to the range from Taiwan, India, Canada, and the People's Republic of China. I'm exposing the world to freedom, first hand, one person at at time...

As we were leaving the range Gang asked if I was going to the gun show this weekend. I told him that I was returning to Idaho but he and his entire family (even the baby) would be welcome and he said he might go to look around. He doesn't have a house right now but when he does he might buy a gun for self-defense then.

For someone who reloads metalic cartridges, I've done it very little.  Still, I've had problems, with several calibers, in seating bullets.  The seating plug that comes with the die set (you only get one plug) doesn't fit every bullet shape ever made, which means it doesn't fit the bullet you're actually using, even if the dies and the bullet were made by the same company.  As a partner to this phenomenon, the loading manual (also written by the bullet company whose sister company made the loading dies) says very little about seating plugs, or the fact that a plug made for one bullet shape might be a real problem when seating a bullet of some other shape.

With some bullet/seating plug combinations, I find it impossible to maintain a cartridge OAL to within 15 or even 20 thousandths, yet the construction of the press should be capable of easily maintaining a seating depth to within a thou or two.

Another part of this cascade of problems is that depending on the bullet type, the bullet itself may be part of the problem.  Softpoints can be distorted in packaging and shipping, can mash during seating if the plug touches soft lead, or a jacketed hollowpoint match bullet's meplat can be inconsistent to several thousandths.  The latter inconsistency isn't all that much of a problem if the seater plug fits OK.  The bullet's ogive is still being seated to the same position and the base is still seating to a consistent depth inside the case because the seater plug doesn't touch the meplat (assuming it fits OK) and you can always trim the meplats.

Today I got the primers I ordered last April or May, so I decided to load some of the 110 gr "Varminter" HPs I'd gotten to try out in .30 Carbine.  Brand new cases, all prepped and flared the same, and I can barely hold C.O.A.L. to within 15 thousandths.  The seater plug was made for the round nose 30 Carb FMJ, and the HP's round nose, made by the same company, has a distinctly different shape from the FMJ, which makes the seater plug impinge on the soft lead corners at the very tip of the bullets.  These HPs, by design, are very soft at the tip.  Some of the bullets get swaged inward at the tip, narrowing the hollow tip opening, raising a burr at the tip and lengthening the bullet.  Others don't distort much at all.  The phenomenon is binary-- either I get a distorted nose and the OAL is 10 to 13 thou over, or the nose stays intact and the OAL is within a couple thou of nominal.  Nothing in between.

Long story short; Die makers should be discussing seater plug issues a lot more, and they should offer a plug for just about every bullet shape, especially plugs that don't impinge on the soft lead of hollowpoints and softpoints unless the plug is going to match the bullet shape perfectly.  Another plug/bullet mismatch I've had results in the mouth of the plug cutting a circle around the bullet like a sharpened punch-- the extremely small contact surface area isn't conducive to repeat accuracy.  As it is, I can always make my own seater plugs, but what a pain just so I can try out some different bullets as a lark.  On a positive note; standard reloading dies are priced unbelieveably low.  You may connect the dots.

We had a rep from Speer in at UltiMAK several weeks ago, setting up some M1 Carbines with our forward optic mounts and high-end combat optics for a LE demonstration of their new .308 110 gr Gold Dot loads (offered to LE only last time I checked).  I've thought for a long time that the M1 Carbine would make a good patrol carbine or "truck gun" if one were to use good HP loads in it.  Haven't heard back from the rep about how the demo went, and I'd sure like to try some of those new Gold Dots.  I guess when they release them to the public they'll be backordered eight months within a week.  I'll take a thousand, please.

A picture I took of Robb Allen's hands, complete with markings by Todd Jarrett are now part of a published magazine article.

For the back story read my previous post.

Update: Here is an automated translation of the article to English.

Update2: Due to concerns about Robb's pants (or lack thereof) here is a picture of Robb taken less than a minute before the picture referenced above:

And here is a picture (I think Tamara is explaining why Robb should keep his pants on) taken about an hour and a half earlier:

Even though Robb didn't seem very happy about it the important parts of his lower body were covered.

Via Say Uncle we have some cute signs.

These remind me of the "I don't dial 911, I dial .357" and "Beware of dog. He eats everything I shoot" type signs. They bring a smile to my face but I would never put one up outside my home.

If someone in my family did use a firearm in self defense I fear the sign would be used in either criminal charges or a civil lawsuit to indicate we were looking for an opportunity to shoot someone and perhaps were just a little "too enthusiastic" about defending ourselves.

It also is an indicator there are guns inside the house which are "available for the taking" when no one is home.

Robar calls their NP3 process "the ultimate firearms finish". I don't have enough data points to confirm or deny that claim but I have to admit I have been very happy with it on my STI Eagle 5.1 (link is to a 5.0, the 5.1 is obsolete). The bluing on my Ruger P-89 wore off after a few years of use and the baked on black finish on my customized Remington 700 is easily scratched. The black anodized aluminum on my AR-15 appears to hold up well although it hasn't been exposed to nearly as much abuse as my pistols have.

After I got my STI back from being repaired it looked like one of those cars you see sometimes with a the hood a different color from the rest of the body and a door or two with still different colors. I took it to the range a put a few rounds through it to verify the functionality and the very next day sent it and several of my magazines to Robar for an NP3 make over.

When I called and asked how long it would take before I would get my gun back they said "we are currently running five to six weeks". It took four weeks to the day.

They disassembled the gun, stripped all the old finish off, and treated most of the internal parts as well as the external. Here is what they say about it:

What is NP3?
NP3 is a surface treatment for steel and metal alloys that combines sub-micron particles of PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), otherwise known as Teflon, with electroless nickel.

NP3 - THE PROCESS
The application of NP3 is auto-catalytic, that is, not requiring any form of electricity. This process is preferable to standard electrolytic plating as all active surfaces are evenly plated, which is not the case with any electrolytically deposited coating. With Robar's well-equipped laboratory, coating thickness can be maintained to within .0002" or two ten thousandths of one inch, guaranteeing consistent quality coatings. With the PTFE evenly distributed and locked into the nickel-phosphorus matrix, NP3 is a true composite. If wear occurs, fresh particles of PTFE are exposed to keep the opposing surfaces lubricated throughout the life of the coating.

NP3 - THE ADVANTAGES

Very accurate and even coatings on all activated surfaces.

No lubrication is needed on opposing surfaces.

Cleaning is minimal, usually requiring only a soft cloth.

Permits firing for longer periods of time between cleaning, as dirt and powder residue has no wet or oily surface to cling to.

NP3 has a micro hardness of 48-51 Rockwell as plated (nickel matrix).

NP3 is very corrosion resistant, a 1 mil (.001) coating exceeding a 240 hour salt spray test.

NP3 has a high lubricity and low friction co-efficient; therefore, the life expectancy of a firearm will be greatly increased due to reduced friction wear.

The coating is strippable with no effect on the base metal, allowing other coatings to be applied or a new coating of NP3 to be applied, if necessary. 

NP3 plated onto stainless steel guns will prevent galling, a problem common with stainless steel.

NP3 is a satin gray, non-reflective color ideal for all firearms.

NP3 can be plated to all internal parts giving a smoothness to the action not found with any other coating.

In cases where the NP3 has been perforated, the corrosion shows no tendency to spread or migrate under the coating.

NP3 is guaranteed against corrosion, peeling or flaking for the lifetime of the firearm.

I think it looks great:

Before I use it for carry or competition I will take it to the range and do some more functional testing. When I got the gun back after getting the original NP3 finish I discovered the gun had a tendency to go full auto on me. I had to take it back to the gunsmith for some minor tweaking of the fire control system. I don't know if it was a disassembly/assembly error or the slick Teflon on some critical surfaces that caused it to misbehave.

If you have a gun in need of a new finish I strongly suggest you consider the NP3.

I carry a gun with me everywhere I can without getting in trouble. Since I sometimes work and play in some extremely dirty environments my carry gun gets very dirty as well (story for the picture below is here):

My Gun Blog 45 has been my carry gun while my STI was being repaired (see also here) and it has been exposed to my daily life. Perhaps I'm expecting too much or the dirt was too much but I'm disappointed in the finish. The paint is wearing off in a number of places:

It took 10 years to get a similar amount of wear in the NP3 finish (custom enhancement, not the default configuration) of my STI. To be fair there was another variable that may have contributed. Most of the holster time for my STI was spent in a leather holster. It may be that the hard plastic Blackhawk holster for the last two months contributed to the excessive wear on the Para gun.

* I didn't invent the phrase "Painted Ordnance" to mock Para Ordinance (now Para USA). I first heard that phrase from another blogger (who will remain nameless unless I have permission to reveal their name) who may or may not have stopped using it out of politeness. Since I, obviously, don't worry all that much about being polite I thought it appropriate to use the phrase for a blog post title.

Take a tactics class, do some scenario-based training, but don’t buy yet another gizmo expecting that it will somehow solve a problem better dealt with by behavior-based training.

Kevin Kerkam
October 8, 2009
Comment to Concealed Carry Identifiers
[This reminds me of when I first started working for Microsoft and participated in pistol shooting leagues. Almost everyone at MS that were in one of the leagues would get involved in on-line discussions about what gun and/or ammo would be best for the league. They had more money than time and tried to throw money at a training problem. I was shooting my Ruger P89 (see the web page of my activities at the time here). I shot in two and sometimes three league matches a week, practiced before every match, and took numerous classes. After a couple years the other guys were debating if they should buy another $2K gun and I had 30K rounds through my pistol and was winning most of the matches. I finally did buy the $2K STI when I was certain the pistol was holding me back.--Joe]

I received an email today from Dave Mason that I thought people might be interested in:

OPI is proud to announce the expansion of our Exploding Target line! In addition to the Rifle targets, we are now offering Rimfire, Pistol, and Exploding Clay Targets.

Our Rifle Targets are the 1 pound, and 2 pound targets everyone has come to appreciate as the ground shaking confirmation of a good shot.

Added to these traditional targets are the Rimfire and Pistol Targets. By popular demand, these targets will detonate when hit with something as small as a .22 CB round or even the fat, slow .45 round. These are available in a 10 pack, but MUST be mixed individually, on the range. These targets are $25.00 for 10 targets, shipping included to the lower 48 states.

We also have Exploding Clay Targets for the shotgun shooters out there. These targets attach to your clays and CANNOT BE USED with automatic launching equipment. You must use hand or spring launchers as you cannot stack the targets. These targets are also $25.00 for 10 targets, shipping included to the lower 48 states.

A word about our New Web-Site: The good news is that is has been completely revamped and looks amazing, including the long requested on-line shopping cart for convenience. The bad news is that it still has a few kinks and is a work in progress. Namely, a few of the pages are coming up, even on our home and business computers, with a security certificate error. There is not a security risk posed by the website, however, please feel free to contact us via e-mail at sales@ozarkpyro.com as alternative ordering method.

In the Research and Development department: Designed primarily for Patrick Flanigan (http://www.patrickflanigan.com) we are back working on explosive fireball and various colored explosions for Patrick’s shows. As soon as we can get these targets in a consumer friendly format, I’ll let you know so that you can buy them too!

Our next Thunder In The Hills was scheduled for 17 October 2009 but there is no way that we can pull it off as we are so busy at this point. We hope to have a spring shoot next year.

For business owners and entrepreneurs out there, join our growing list of distributors and purchase at wholesale prices for sales in your store and/or at gun shows. Please e-mail us for an information packet about what OPI can offer your business!

 

Sincerely,

Dave Mason
President
Ozark Pyrotechnics, Inc.
P.O. Box 118
Hartville, MO 65667-0118
417-741-1142
http://www.OzarkPyro.com
http://www.ThunderInTheHills.info

I've had lots and lots of request for "Shotgun Boomers" and I put a couple of days worth of effort into it without success. Dave apparently has it figured out and is offering them for sale. I can occasionally get a pistol to detonate the boomers but that usually requires that you be entertainingly close and I don't recommend that unless you fill out your nomination form for a Darwin award beforehand. And for rimfire detonation of our targets it requires a rifle, high velocity ammo, and close ranges.

I have this "thing" about encouraging people to learn precision long range shooting and just don't have that much interest in the shotgun and pistol side of things. The "clean up"/high-intensity events came about because it wasn't that much additional effort for me and so many people wanted to do it. I don't really "get it" like I do the long range stuff but if that gets you fired up then Dave's your man.

Please check the laws in your state/county before you decide to buy exploding targets. I would hate to have contributed to you having unexpected "quality time" with your local law enforcement officer. And please be very, very careful with them.

Daughter Kim and her husband Caleb took friend Amber to the range last Monday. It was the first time Amber had ever shot a gun.

They borrowed my Ruger Mark II and all the reports indicate Amber enjoyed herself and did well:

Welcome to the community Amber.

And thank you Kim and Caleb for making her introduction to shooting enjoyable.

Maybe I'm the last to know, but I just found out that the nominal outer diameter of a gauge-numbered machine screw is defined as the gauge number multiplied by .013", plus .060".  The actual diameter is usually two or three thousandths or so under nominal.  I know 'cause we tried it.  And as you are all know doubt aware; once you reach a quarter inch, you're going by fractional inch dimensions instead of gauge.  Wood screws go by their own, as yet mysterious to me, system, probably developed by some guy and his partner making screws by hand 250 years ago.

Who cares?  Well, we have run into problems with what we refer to as "stacking tolerances" in our production-- a threading tap varies slightly (both initially and over time with wear) the anodizing depth varies slightly, and screw dimensions vary slightly even if you stick with one supplier.  If these variations all go in the wrong direction at once, you end up with customers calling you saying the screws are so tight in the mount that some of them are breaking, even though you've been doing everything exactly the same for years and it's always worked nicely.  We started using +.001" and +.002" oversized form taps a few years ago, to make up for the thickness the anodizing adds to the threads, and then some, and the problem went away.  Now at least we can measure screws and know exactly how they vary from "nominal" as opposed to making simply comparative measurements.

This new (to me) tidbit of information is just icing on the cake for you engineers out there, in the unlikely event that you were as ignorant of such things as I was a few minutes ago.  What I still don't understand is why we call a number eight screw a number eight screw instead of a .164" screw.  Too many digits?  But then you'd not have to remember gauge x .013" + .060".

Some of these oddities come down from the past in "organic" ways.  Firearm bullet and bore diameters are a good example.  Who the hell came up with .223, .308 or .452, as opposed to, say .200, .250, .300 .350, etc?  Some of these unlikely numbers, at least in part, come from the days of black powder, wrought iron barrels, soft lead bullets, and the manufacturing tolerances of yore.  The realistic tolerances back then were nowhere near what's possible now, and it resulted in some pretty weird numbers that became standards out of expediency and in response to backward compatibility issues.  I use a .454 ball (that number's still with us) in an 1850s .44 percussion revolver for example, because the oversized ball gets better purchase on the sides of the chamber and on the rifling.  We would now refer to a .454 bullet as caliber 45, though you were shooting it from what was called a .44 caliber pistol back in the 1860s, and the modern 45 cal bullets are .451" and .452".  Modern 44 caliber bullets are .429".  Huh?  I definitely need to learn more about this stuff.  In another .44 percussion revolver I have I use a .457" ball-- you want a ball that's bigger than the cylinder, and a cylinder that's bigger than the barrel groove diameter, so everything gets a sure, tight fit with the soft lead ball.

We still use grains as a unit of measurement, which came from some king somewhere telling us that the official definition of a pound was "seven thousand plump grains of wheat" (what poor saps had to count them, then recount them, and who verified their work?).  Shotgunners use the dram, which converts to the tidy number of 27.34375 grains, or the "dram equivalent", which is a charge of modern smokeless powder that generates about the same energy as that number of drams of black powder.

If we were to start all over and reinvent guns from the beginning today, we'd no doubt end up with simpler units and numbers, but the world doesn't work that way.  Each incremental development is built upon the previous one, and you don't immediately re-tool everyone in the business, make all the old versions unusable, and change all the established experience and data, just for that little increment of improvement.

Still, I keep saying someone needs to reinvent the computer OS (or the very concept of the computer OS-- maybe the very use of the term "OS" is thinking too much inside the box) from the beginning.  There is of course no basis-- no established school of thought or system of evaluation that would warrant such a claim.

I'm trying to do my part to stimulate the economy by upping the number of rounds I'm putting down range each month and getting new shooters to the range. I figure we just about have to do it. The ammo factories hired new people and if we don't keep buying the ammo they will get laid off, right?

Here's the background story:

Bullet-makers are working around the clock, seven days a week, and still can't keep up with the nation's demand for ammunition.

...

"We are working overtime and still can't keep up with the demand," said Al Russo, spokesman for North Carolina-based Remington Arms Company, which makes bullets for rifles, handguns and shotguns. "We've had to add a fourth shift and go 24-7. It's a phenomenon that I have not seen before in my 30 years in the business."

Americans usually buy about 7 billion rounds of ammunition a year, according to the National Rifle Association. In the past year, that figure has jumped to about 9 billion rounds, said NRA spokeswoman Vickie Cieplak.

Nine billion rounds in one year with about 80 million gun owners in the U.S. works out to about only about 112 rounds per gun owner. I went through that many rounds both last night and the night before. I'll go through probably another 200 rounds tonight and then another 150 on Sunday. What the heck is going on here? I'm figure I'm just doing my civic duty here and it turns out I'm doing the job of about 100 other people as well.

If every gun owner were going through just 100 rounds a month that would be nearly 100 billion rounds a year. That is a way to stimulate the economy and have something to show for it afterward--an armed and well practiced citizenry and respectful politicians.

Via email from Anthony who said, "I am amazed, no SHOCKED you have not blogged on this yet."

Yeah, yeah. I'm getting slow in my old age. That and preparing for a pistol match on Sunday.

Here's how you prepare for a sporting event:

India's cricketers at the Champions Trophy in South Africa are being encouraged by their coach to have sex to boost their on-field performance, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The benefits of sex feature prominently in a secret document circulated among players by coach Gary Kirsten and mental conditioning expert Paddy Upton, the Hindustan Times said in a front-page report.

It came as India take on arch-rivals Pakistan in their first Champions Trophy match in Centurion on Saturday.

The large-selling broadsheet, which claimed to have a copy of the document, said the relevant chapter was headlined "Does sex increase performance?".

"Yes it does, so go ahead and indulge," the document said, before detailing the benefits of a good sex life and even suggesting "going solo" if no partners were available.

"From a physiological perspective, having sex increases testosterone levels, which cause an increase in strength, energy, aggression and competitiveness," the document said.

"Conversely, not having sex for a period of a few months causes a significant drop in testosterone levels in both males and females, with the corresponding passiveness and decrease in aggression."

The document quotes Tim Noakes, a professor and sports scientist at the University of Cape Town, Kirsten's home town, as saying that "sex was not a problem, but being up till 2:00 am, probably having a few drinks at a bar while trying to pick someone up, on the eve of a game, almost always was."

The document helpfully suggests a solution.

"If you want sex but do not have someone to share it with, one option is to go solo whilst imagining you have a partner, or a few partners, who are as beautiful as you wish to imagine," the document said.

"No pillow talk and no hugging required. Just roll over and go to sleep."

Dr. Joe's Cure for Everything is validated yet again.

Tuesday I reported on taking Priyanka to the range for her first experience shooting guns. It turns out that her officemate overheard us talking and asked to go with us. He had never shot a gun before either and really wanted to try it.

I didn't really want to take two new shooters to the range at the same time when I only had one small booth to work in. So I offered to take him to the range on Wednesday (last night).

It's always interesting to see what different students have trouble with and how to come up with an exercise to get them past it. Priyanka had trouble shooting fast and accurately. Shooting slow and accurate wasn't a problem. By moving the target very close she could exercise the "fast" aspect without having to worry about the accurate part so much. Then when the target went back out to a more normal distance she was able to combine the two skills she had learned.

Andrei had problems with pulling his shots low and left. Because of the Crimson Trace laser on the Ruger Mark II I could see that he was aiming well but just as the gun would go off it would dip low and left. Dry fire exercises enable him to see the problem as well. I told him to do most of the squeezing of the grip with his weak hand and concentrate on just moving his trigger finger so his dominate hand didn't grasp at the same time as the trigger finger moved. Plus, pay less attention to having a good sight picture and more attention to getting a surprise trigger break. It was hard for him but more and more shots started going where they belonged.

After putting a 100 or so rounds of .22 LR down range he wanted to try the Gun Blog 45. Here he is looking for the little knob on the side of the magazine (like on the Ruger Mark II) to push the follower down:

I didn't let him struggle for long and soon he was getting pretty good results with the .45:

Andrei is originally from Canada but is currently working for a company in California (this company is partnering with Microsoft on a project so he is in Redmond for a while). He asked about how he could buy a gun. What does he have to do? What kind of guns could he buy? I told him what I knew about the gun laws in Canada, California, and Washington and told him that California was more oppressive than Washington and Canada was much more oppressive but he could still have handguns in Canada if he put in enough effort. He said he wanted to stay in the U.S.

I had put on my holster and gun (Gun Blog 45 and the Blackhawk holster I got last year when I went to summer camp) as soon as we got in the car which I had parked off campus. As we left the range he commented on concealed carry and so I explained licenses, open carry, and the laws in Washington versus California. He seemed quite interested and eager to learn more. Next week is not available because Barb will be visiting but if he is still in town the week after I'll offer to take him to the range again.

Handing your permit under you license is a purposeful and proven psychological manipulation that produces better outcomes. There is no doubt in my mind at all about that. Maybe 1 time in 30 interactions has it produced the opposite affect and even then all that happened was I got the ticket I deserved in the first place. The other one ticket I received was given to me with no hostile intent because of the gun or permit, they just didn't factor in at all.

Telling an officer you have a permit or gun WILL produce anxiety because the officer now has to react quickly to new data and it throws their script. He can't just ignore verbal interactions or choose to act on the data at his own pace. Officers crave control, telling him he must deal with anything new and not on his plan makes him feel he is losing control. He will respond aggressively/dominantly as a default reaction to lack of control. An officer finding out you are carrying after interacting with you for an extended period will cause him to feel you have been holding out and been one-up on him without his knowledge.

Greg Hamilton
Chief Instructor Insights Training
August 24, 2009
From the Insights Training Center email list on the proper interaction with the police when you are carrying a concealed weapon and have a concealed weapons permit.
[I have used this method for years with good results. I'm strongly inclined to believe Greg has the psychology correct.--Joe]

I have taken something like eight classes (and some of those were taken twice) from Insights. I have put my wife and kids through some of the classes as well. I have been very impressed with their training.

Contrary to the stereotype of gun owners being stupid and just wanting to kill and destroy stuff I was always impressed with how smart the instructors were and how they taught us to avoid confrontations before deploying lethal force. I have been very, very impressed with how much thought they have given to the topic of self defense. They have distilled the concepts and present them in succinct form that you almost instantly recognize as, "Wow! That right!" Examples of such are some of the quotes of Greg Hamilton and John Fogh I have in my collection (not a complete listing):

• The combat philosophy
• Complying with a mugger/rapists demands
• Sheep, wolfs, and sheepdogs
• Stopping power
• Taking the fight out
• When to shoot
• How many shots
• Universal hand signals
• The proper fighting mindset
• Attitude to avoid being prey
• Dealing with an active shooter
• Increasing the effectiveness of your ammo
• Why the world needs guns
• How to say, "Please don't rape me"

Sean Flynn is similarly impressed with Hamilton and company.

Today Kevin Kerkam, also an instructor there, contributed a blog post that is another one of those insights (pun intended) that makes you think, "Of course! I should have thought of that but I know I never would have."

As I said yesterday I had arranged to take a new shooter to the range this evening.

She was a little nervous and at first you could even see her hands shake when she loaded the magazine of the Ruger Mark II. When she did some dry fire exercises I could see the gun shake as well. It wasn't all nervousness though. She has very slender arms and the longer she held the gun out at arms length the more it shook and the more she bent her elbows.

Still, when she fired her first shots at a about 10 feet away they were all "in the black":

After several ordinary targets I put up a slightly used USPSA target and said, "This is a bad guy." Here is the A-zone. Keep all your shots in the A-zone while shooting as fast as you can.

She had some problems. Many of the shots were going way low. I moved the target in very close about two feet from the muzzle and told her to point and shoot as fast as she could--the bad guy was very close. She shot fast and all the bullets were A-zone hits.

She wanted the target further away so gave her another slightly used USPSA target and she moved it to about 15 feet away and opened fire: 

This time nearly all the shots were solid A-zone hits and she had a big smile on her face (Update: she didn't like any of the pictures of her face so that photo has been removed).

I showed her my Gun Blog 45, hollow point bullets, FMJ bullets, and emptied a couple magazines. One at slow speed with maximum accuracy and one as fast as I could shoot and keep them on target. She declined to shoot the .45.

I showed her a S&W .22 revolver and let her shoot that. She much preferred the semi-auto pistol.

We had a long talk about self-defense and "who needs a gun". She explained that in India it is very difficult to get a gun and very few people have them. Here many people have them and people use them to hurt other people. Why is it that people can get a gun so easily here?

I told her it was a choice everyone needs to make for themselves. She lives across the street from work and goes to work and gets off during daylight hours. It is in a nice part of town. She has no abusive ex-boyfriends. Other people may go to work or get off work very late at night in a very bad part of town. Everyone needs to make their own decisions. I told her of one of my first students who was a very petite middle-aged woman who told me she was a judge and some of her "customers" were very unhappy with her decisions. She had seen some of these people watch her as she left the courthouse. She had never considered owning a gun before let alone carry one when she went to/from work or when she went to the store. She sometimes traveled on her job and would spend the night alone in a motel many miles from home. She and her husband decided she needed to have a concealed carry permit, a gun, and training. She bought a gun and I taught her to use it defensively. The sheriff issued her a permit and she now carries the gun. I think she made the right decision. I told her of the person searching for "what means of self defence will you use as a woman when you are been raped by a man" who found my blog. And I told her of John Fogh's advice for such a situation.

I told her of my Just One Question and what the numbers were on criminal use, defensive use, and suicide. I told her how a gun made it possible for a weak 85 year-old woman to defend herself against a large young man.

She said she had a wonderful time and I dropped her off at her apartment--she took all the targets with her.

I never imagined I would even just hold a gun in my hands.

Priyanka
September 22, 2009
[Priyanka is from India. She is my mentee at work and now at the range.--Joe]

When I read something like this in my referral logs I want to reach out to them and give whatever advice I can:

Domain Name		newcom-intl.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address		204.14.45.# (Karib Cable Kelcom International)
ISP		NewCom International
Location		Continent  :  South America Country  :  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines  (Facts) State/Region  :  Saint George City  :  Kingstown Lat/Long  :  13.1333, -61.2167 (Map) Distance  :  3,954 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  24 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 21 2009 9:44:19 pm
Last Page View		Sep 21 2009 9:44:19 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co... by a man.I want to
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		what means of self defence will you use as a woman when you are been raped by a man.i want to
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...date,2009-04-13.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...date,2009-04-13.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Sep 21 2009 9:44:19 pm
Visit Number		599,244

Send me an email or even call me (208-301-4254).

Tomorrow evening I'm taking a young woman to the range. She has never shot a gun before. I'm nearly certain she asked to do this because she is adventuresome and thinks it might be exciting to shoot a gun (she wants to try some explosives next month). But I'll be explaining the utility of multiple jacketed hollow point bullets and the advice of John Fogh while I'm at it.

Via email from Chet.

What? Do they only have enough money for food or something? I thought they could always find money to fund their hate of capitalism and buy more Kalashnikov rifles. But perhaps not:

Russia's largest small arms manufacturer, the Izhevsk Mechanical Works [Izhmash], could be declared bankrupt. It became know today that a corresponding petition has been received by the arbitration court of [the Republic of] Udmurtia from the enterprise.

...

This largest Kalashnikov assault rifle manufacturer now stands idle. No state order means no money to pay employees, nor to repay debts to creditors.

This Christmas I'm going shopping for the girls at GlamGuns.com where I can pick up stuff like this:

It's never to early to learn demolition. Hard targets are no longer a challenge with the Glambo Signature Series EZ-Boom Oven. Locked out of the clubhouse? Fight back! Includes enough of her patented, quick-setting mix to make one pound of plastique and will provide your child with hours of fun. (Safety armor not included.)

My girls just loved "My little Pony" but now that they are all grown up it's time for grown up toys fully loaded with nostalgia:

The Glambo Signature Series "My Little Pony" M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight. This fully functional weapon fires standard 5.56mm ammunition -- great for those AR-15 fans with extra ammo lying around the house or even extra parts! (Note: the full-auto selection has been disabled in this model in favor of three-round-burst. This product cannot be shipped to California.) The perfect way to introduce your little princess to the wonders of nocturnal wet-work!

There are also Hilton Handcuffs and Martha's Mines--just the thing for stocking stuffers at the Huffman-Scott compound and bunker complex.

H/T to Kris who sent me the link in an email.

I needed some repair work done on my STI Eagle 5.1 and from my phone call to them I expected to have it back in about 10 days. It arrived at their factory on August 12^th. I received it back yesterday. That was exactly 35 days.

I started getting a hint that things weren't going so well about a week after they got it when I got a call and instead of them telling me it was on it's way back David told me he had just briefly looked at it and, "that's a really old gun". Hmm... And your point is? It turns out there was far more wrong with the gun than I knew and that a lot of things were built different that they were when the gun was new. That meant some replacement parts weren't just drop in. They were going to have to do some machining on the frame. Stuff that wasn't going to be covered under warranty. Fine, give me an estimate and then I'll decide.

Nearly a week after that on August 31^st I had an exact amount and sent David (yes, to him personally rather than STI) a check for $231 for the non-warranty work. He also told me there were things wrong that he couldn't really fix and but it would still be good enough for "What we down here in Texas call a 'truck gun'". Great. My STI is now a "truck gun". But for $231 I would have functional gun that would be far better than any other gun I could buy for $231.

To be fair the stuff he didn't want to work on were things that I had long suspected were messed up by the original gunsmith (who shall remain nameless because he is no longer working as a gunsmith anyway) who built it from a kit. Nearly the first thing I did when I got my hands on the gun back in 1998 was check the slide to frame fit when the gun was in battery. I was shocked and disappointed that there was quite a bit of movement. I looked up in surprise and the gunsmith said that he had asked me if I was going to carry the gun or just shoot it in competition. I told him both. So he made the tolerances much greater than a competition only gun. He said that he was taught that a carry gun needed to have looser tolerances so it would be more reliable. I asked if it could be tightened up and he told me that for all practical purposes the answer was no. Rather than rejecting the gun due to a misunderstanding I took it. I really couldn't complain about the accuracy. It wasn't what I expected but there were very few stages which I competed in for which the accuracy was a limiting factor.

But that wasn't the only problem with the gun.

The lugs for the barrel link broke on the original STI barrel after only about 20K rounds. The gunsmith figured it had to be a defective barrel. STI didn't see it that way and I paid for new, non-STI barrel to be installed. A few years later I told someone else about this and he told me the only way that break occurs is if the barrel was installed wrong. David, at STI, told me the "new" barrel was installed incorrectly as well but it isn't likely to break--it just doesn't lock up quite right and the accuracy is degraded.

So, I took the gun to the range tonight and it functioned well. The new safety fits better than the old ones (I had the first gunsmith replace a one that broken once before) ever did but it required some machining on the frame to get the new safety to fit. I'm glad I didn't try to do it myself because I don't have access to a milling machine to do the type of cuts that were required--besides not knowing that the frames were built different now and that the frame cuts were required instead of removing material from the safety.

I'm a little annoyed at STI for taking five weeks when I expected something closer to one week. And the non-warranty work being done via a direct payment to David is a little unprofessional. But except for the slide to frame fit everything on the gun looks very good to me. I'll probably continue to use the gun in competition for quite a while longer. Maybe next summer I'll be able to justify (money, it's a lot of money) a new STI (Eagle 5.0 or maybe an Eagle 6.0--any suggestions?) and put this one "behind the seat of the truck".

Regardless of my irritation with STI I still say--I shoot a STI gun in competition, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

I have an expired Utah license and because it has been expired too long I have to reapply as a new applicant. I'm seriously thinking of taking this Utah Concealed Firearm Permit Class on September 26^th.

Anyone else want to show up at the class and hang out with me? It's just four hours on a Saturday.

Update: I was reminded by Barb that her schedule is changing and I will be in Idaho on this weekend. And with her new schedule none of the Utah classes listed match my schedule.

Via email from Kris:

I'd taken my nephew Ben out shooting several times, including the Boomershoot last Spring, and he'd liked it well enough he decided to tell his cousin Matt about it.  Matt decided he wanted to learn about rifles and marksmanship, so they called me and we set up a date.

This Winchester AK-47 is in recoil as a cloud of dirt erupts from behind the 100 yard target.  Ben is behind the controls (or is that terror rifle controlling him?  OMG!!);

Below is Matt firing a Colt AK-47 HBAR from the bench.  After starting out on a Marlin .22 rimfire AK-47 and graduating to the 1894 Winchester AK-47 chambered for the old .30-30 Copkiller cartridge, both off-hand with open sights, this Colt AK-47 shown below with its 4x Trijicon ACOG telescope was as easy for him as, well, something super easy;

And Matt again below, with a Springfield AK-47 HBAR chambered in .308 Massmurder, and a Billybob 3-9 x 40 scope on an ARMS #18 mount.  The deep space telescope on the T&E mount at left is for spotting bullet holes;

The ARMS 18 mount sits nice and low over the receiver, but that nice lowness creates a problem.  Several shots from each magazine result in a failure to eject due to cases hitting the mount.  During Boomershoot I was told that standard M80 ball works fine and dandy with this config.  We were using some super accurate, deadly at 37.25 miles, sniper rounds in this AK-47, but I had tried the far-less-dangerous-to-the-climate-and-all-things-holy, M80 earlier, and the claims made by some military shooters at Boomershoot seem to be correct.  For some reason, I'll guess op-rod velocity, the .mil stuff seems to run without being stopped by the ARMS mount.  My preferred load for this AK-47 though is the Black Hills 168 grain Match/Terrorist/AngryRacistMob round.

By the way; if you're contemplating installing ANY receiver scope mount on an M1A (sorry-- AK-47) you must plan on hand-fitting it, or having it fit by someone who's aware of this issue.  Your chances of a drop-in fit are quite low, from my experience, and from talking with many other users.  That includes a Springfield mount on a Springfield rifle too.  It took me hours of file-and-try, file-and-try, to get this ARMS mount to sit on there correctly.  The catch is; it SEEMS to go on OK with the first try, but if you tighten the receiver bolt, you're potentially distorting your receiver, mount, and bolt threads, as the mount is being forced into a position it can't fit.  You then notice, either before you've spent hours at the range in frustration, or after, that the mount's rail isn't near well enough aligned with the barrel to get a zero.  That's if you're lucky.  If you're unlucky like I was when I installed my first Springfield mount, the rail will be close enough in alignment that you can actually get a zero, and then things go all to hell afterwards as your mount and receiver slowly peen together, and the zero never stays in one place for long.  If the mount is fit properly, the design and function is quite successful, other than the aforementioned ejection issue.  This Springfield AK-47 has never had a single stoppage otherwise, either.  'Course, if you have the standard barrel version, you solve all this time and heartache by using the UltiMAK M8 forward mount.  One problem THERE is; a lot of owners don't really know which barrel weight they have, and SA was making it worse for a couple years by naming one of their medium weight barrel models the "Loaded Standard".  Yeesh.  But they fixed that since.

A a good joke is based on at least a little bit of truth. Examples are here and the variation here.

Life imitated art just down the road from me (even closer to home is that Ry, son James, and I used to work in the building next door):

Kirkland police, contacted today for more details, said a passerby on their way to the local farmer's market called 911 saying that they thought they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47 about 4:20 p.m.

Here is the AK-47:

A few days ago I posted about the need to get off the line of attack when someone is charging at you. I didn't elaborate on what that really means and how to do it. I "knew" the answer because I had seen it done in training at Insights but I could really put it into words as well as I could demonstrate it with real people and fake guns (or fake pepper spray--the same principles apply).

I would be difficult for me to over-emphasis the importance of knowing how to do this. If you know what you are doing and have the right tools you can easily avoid blood loss from a knife attacker starting at less than the normal 21 feet.

John, being the expert trainer and having taught this technique, drew us a picture and put it into words. Words to live by.

This is mostly to the other bloggers that went to Summer Camp with me last year but I thought it might be of more general interest as well.

When I went to the range last night I was wearing my Blackwater USA (recently rebranded to "U.S. Training Center") cap and t-shirt. I've worn the hat there before but never the shirt. The staff was extraordinarily friendly to me. They had a big smile on their face and didn't ask to see my ID card and had my stack of free targets in their hand and extended to me before I even reached the counter.

Has anyone else noticed people treating you differently when you are wearing Blackwater branded clothes?

I was invited to be on Blog Talk Radio tonight. I'll be talking (or maybe mostly just listening) with a bunch of Gun Nuts. The official description of tonights show is (links added):

Joining us tonight will be a veritable cornucopia of blogging awesome, as LabRat, Stingray, Kevin Baker, Joe Huffman, and Robb Allen will be joining us to discuss blogging and current events. Don't miss it!

Caleb also has a post up about the show.

Update: Breda says, like herding cats. She also says, "notorious for their independent, quick-witted, and sometimes even contrary characters". The others on the panel are definitely very quick-witted I won't think of witty things to say until an hour after the show is over. However, Barb will vouch for me being "notorious" and "contrary".

Via email from Say Uncle:

I thought IDPA was supposed to be about real world defensive shooting. If so then why didn't the shooter get off the line of attack? In my training at Insights we did a LOT of that. I kept wanting to push off to one side just watching this video.

Robb Allen also has some comments on the video.

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday I had a request for permission to use some of my pictures in an Italian magazine and blog. He told me:

Both on my site and on my articles, I write about reloading, especially for pistols.

One of my elaboration led me to examine the correlation between recoil intensity and bullets weight. I will public this article both on my site and on "Armi Magazine" journal. Now I am searching some pictures about recoil.

This email to ask you if I could use some of beautiful photos from your blog, in particular that in attached (have you the HD format ?), for sure I will mention your name on the pictures.

Here are the pictures (cropped down to the interesting parts) I sent him:

Some of you will recognize the guns and others will recognize their own hands.

Update: I have a .pdf file of the completed article now. Only the first picture above was used (Robb, your hands may soon be famous in Italy). Once the article is actually published I should be getting a link to it and I will post it. Here is the title of the article:

"Tiro dinamico: palla leggera o pesante ?" - "Dynamic shooting (IPSC): light or heavy bullet?"

Sub title: "Rilevamento e tempo di riarmo di una pistola in funzione del peso palla" - "Recoil and slide time as a function of bullet weight"

As I have been shooting IPSC (now USPSA) for nearly 15 years this is a topic of great interest to me. From what I can tell looking at the graphs and picking up a few words and numbers in the article this is a very interesting article. I'll probably spend the time to run it through an automated translator to get a better idea of what it says.

Suppose you are interested in improving your pistol scores in a game where time matters--a lot. USPSA, Steel Challenge, or IDPA for example.

How do you go about that? Well, practice, sure. But what do you practice? And how do you know what your weak areas are? It was several years ago (since this post is about precise units of time it was 12 years, 10 months and 1 day ago) but I took a class called Intensive Handgun Skills and learned some interesting things about this topic.

I'm not sure why but a lot of people spend a lot of time practicing their draw (I used to too). They will spend hours trying to shave another 0.1 or 0.2 seconds off their draw. 0.5 seconds faster? That would be awesome, right?

Maybe not. Let's do some simple arithmetic.

Suppose you are shooting a fairly simple stage such as El Presidente. You draw (and turn), shoot six rounds, reload, and shoot six more rounds.

That involves one draw, one reload, and ten splits. If you were to cut 0.05 seconds off each of your splits you are just as well off as if you had cut that awesome 0.5 seconds off of your draw or reload.

What about something even simpler? A Steel Challenge stage has five plates and involves drawing and shooting five rounds (assuming you hit them all with one shot). So that is one draw and four splits. In order to match that awesome 0.5 seconds you worked so hard to gain on your draw you need to improve your splits by only 0.125 seconds each.

That doesn't mean you can ignore your draw or reloads but it does mean, in absolute terms, your split times are generally more important than the draw and reloads.

But how much is there to be gained in your shooting? If you are already getting 0.25 second A-zone double taps on the USPSA target at 10 yards getting another 0.05 seconds represents a 20% improvement. If your draw is 2.5 seconds then 0.5 seconds also represents a 20% improvement to it. One might think that the effort involved should be about the same, 20% either way. Right?

It turns out that isn't true. Or at least that isn't the way to bet.

A better way to look at the problem is to compare yourself to other shooters and keep yourself "balanced". If you improve your weakest areas you will get a better return on your investment in practice time and ammo.

Here is a table they gave us (I added the "Calculated El Presidente" row) at that class nearly 13 years ago:

In the table above it is assumed you are getting all A-zone hits. If you aren't getting A-zone hits in practice you are going too fast. You should push yourself until you occasionally get a non-A hit but then you back off such that you are just on the edge.

So if you are already getting 0.25 second A-Zone double taps you are shooting at about 95% of the skill level of the best shooters in the world. But if your draw is 2.5 seconds you are at about the 55% level. If you spend your time on your draw you should be able to cut 0.5 seconds off of it much faster and easier than you could cut another 0.05 off of your splits. And probably you will get over a full second off of it without too much trouble.

This assumes you are using the proper technique. You may be hitting a "wall" because you are practicing the wrong thing. If you are way off "balance" and things aren't getting better as fast as you think they should then get some expert instruction to make sure you are practicing the right thing. Remember what Say Uncle said one year and five days ago.

Similar trade-offs can be made for determining what other skills you should practice.

Keep it balanced and practice the right things.

Everyone knows what Russian Roulette is. But have you heard the joke about French Roulette? Yes, there is a real game by this name but many decades ago it was also a joke involving Bridget Bardot.

The post from Tamara this morning reminded me of the joke. I have modified it by substituting a different person for Bardot and it becomes "Gun Blogger Roulette" instead of French Roulette.

Q: Do you know how to play Gun Blogger Roulette?
A: Six guys take showers and you give them each a towel when they get out--one of the towels has Roberta X. in it.

Yeah, I know. I'm risking a lot with that.

It's all in good fun, right? Right? Please?

A couple weeks ago I wrote about evidence that niece Lisa shared genes with me.

Today she applied for a concealed weapons permit.

Which reminds me. I never mentioned that at the last Boomershoot daughter Kim was stopped by the police while driving to Orofino. I think it was a headlight that was out...

Anyway, the police officer said nice things to Kim about having a concealed weapons permit.

I'm so proud of both of them.

You've heard the 200 million guns in this country before, right? The anti-gun people fainted and after they woke up they told anyone that would listen there was approaching almost one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. We of course were concerned as well because that meant some of us weren't doing our part and buying enough guns to arm all the neighbors in case of a Zombie attack.

Alan points out that maybe the numbers were actually understated:

The lamestream media has been claiming for years and years there are about 200 million guns in America. With about 100 million sold in just the past decade, even the brain dead can tell the media is just parroting a number without doing any research. At the very least, they should up the numbers from time to time, no?

If I recall correctly the 200 million number is an estimate at least partially based on survey results. If so then people are going to under report the number of guns in their homes.

That would explain 100 million sold in the past decade when the destruction, loss, confiscation rate is certainly going to be far, far below that.

I'm feeling better now. When the Zombies attack I want a gun and a back up gun with lots of ammo available for everyone. It appears we have almost enough guns now and we can start stocking up on the ammo now.

On Friday my officemate told me Kris had just stopped by and left something for me. I found a damaged Pocket PC with a note on it asking that I do an Idaho Stress Test on it. I contacted Kris via IM for more details. The screen had been damaged and was completely non-functional. There was company sensitive data on the device which needed to be destroyed and Kris wanted me to do this for him.

On Saturday daughter Kimberly and I went to the Boomershoot site and, among other things, destroyed the data for Kris. I also had a hard disk that was in similar need of "data reduction" and we deleted the data on both items at the same time.

Tomorrow I'll deliver the pieces Kim and I found to Kris but for the rest of you here are a few pictures assembled into a video:

Looks like Jackson Pollack threw up in here.

Tamara K.
August 24, 2008
Referring to all the previous use of Simunitions in the Blackwater 360 degree shoothouse.
[I want to do the "Blackwater thing" with all the gun bloggers again. That was really fun.--Joe]

If you ever heard me say I was working on an iPhone killer this wasn't what I meant:

I wouldn't do that.

I would perform an Idaho Stress Test instead.

Will more .38 Supers show up next year? Is the .45ACP now obsolete? In a nut shell, no. The .45 will continue to dominate. The cost of shooting a .38 Super loaded to make major caliber are astronomical. The brass is only good for one loading due to the pressures that swell the web. The beating the gun takes drastically reduces gun life compared to that of a .45.

Cameron Hopkins
American Handgunner
May/June 1985, p. 54
[FYI, nearly 25 years after writing the above Hopkins is still writing.

Just another reminder for myself.

It's risky to make predictions. I do it anyway and I'm reckless enough to sometimes put the predictions in writing. You would think that seeing the colossal failures of others that do this would be warning enough--but apparently it is not.--Joe]

A friend of Barb's and mine for over twenty years contacted me recently and asked to take me up on my offer to teach her to shoot. We went to Wades this afternoon. I had her shooting my Ruger Mark II. It has a six inch bull barrel and her arms got tired quickly. I went back out to the front desk and utilized my "free rental" (comes with being a member) for a Browning Buck Mark. It was much lighter and she did better.

At about 10 feet nearly all of her shots were within the black. After about 20 rounds she told me, "Maybe I should buy a gun." I said we could talk about it after we got outside. I did a little bit of shooting with the Buck Mark and my Gun Blog 45 then we left.

In the parking lot I asked her about why she wanted a gun. The answer was the economy is probably going to get worse and Obama may make it difficult to get a gun. She wanted a gun to be able to protect herself and her youngest daughter who lives with her. She asked how much a gun costs and if a .22 would be okay for her needs. I suggested she should practice some more and try to get the strength to be able to shoot something a little bigger. But, the most important selection criteria was that she feel comfortable shooting it. If that means a .22 then that would be best for her.

I emailed her a link to this class which would let her shoot a number of guns as well as cover other important issues of gun ownership such as self-defense legal issues. She responded with:

I will sign up the class with my brother.

...

Thank you so much for teaching me. You are a great teacher. ...you can post the comment to the blog too. :)

We are winning the gun rights issue one new shooter at a time.

My STI Eagle 5.1 is in need of repairs. There was the thumb safety which I still hadn't fixed even though I had the new safety in hand. It requires some fitting and I just hadn't taken the time to go to the farm where all the good tools are.

I also had purchased a RecoilMaster nearly two years ago and found it didn't fit right. My gun is old enough that some milling needed to be done before it could be installed. Newer STIs come from the factory in a configuration where you can just drop the RecoilMaster in. I had never followed through to get the work done.

But my biggest concern was that the hammer, on two occasions in about 300 rounds, followed the slide. Requiring the hammer to be manual cocked before it would fire. I'm a little surprised it didn't "double" on me. After the first time I inspected and cleaned the gun. I couldn't find anything wrong and I tried to duplicate the problem manually, without ammo, and could not. Okay, maybe the auto-disconnecter was dirty enough that something didn't work right. The gun is clean now so maybe the problem has gone away. Shortly after saying that the problem happened again.

The gunsmith that built the gun for me is no longer in business so I asked the guy behind the counter at Wades if their gunsmith would have a reasonable turn around time. It turns out they don't really have a "gunsmith" on staff. They have an "armorer". The difference being the armorer doesn't do work that involves milling or other major metal moving. So I went to the website of a gunsmith I know in Idaho. Shawn Carlock is an USPSA shooter and I was pretty sure he did pistol work. I couldn't find reference to it on his website. There was lots of info about rifle work but nothing about pistols. I called him up and he told me they stopped working on pistols and shotguns about three years ago. Bummer.

I asked around for some recommendations and called up a couple guys.

As I was explaining the work I wanted done to the first guy he asked, "What type of gun is it again?" "It's an STI", I told him. "Oh, a Stye", he said. He pronounced as a word like the eyelid infection. After a few seconds he interrupted me to ask, "Is that like a Colt?" "Uhhh... yeah. Except Colts are called 1911's and this is called a 2011 and has a grip wide enough to take double stack magazines." At this point I was pretty sure I wanted to get someone else but I asked him what his turn around time would be. He said he could get started on it right away and could have it back to me in a couple days.

I talked to the second guy and he was familiar with STIs in general although not the Eagle 5.1. I asked him for his turnaround time and he said he was currently quoting sometime in November. Ouch.

I called up STI thinking that it would probably be expensive getting the work done at the factory but maybe they could recommend a gunsmith in my area of operation. I talked to Bobby in "Warranty" who said turn around time was usually five to seven business days but currently he was essentially all caught up and they had him working in production part of the time. How much is this going to cost me? This gun is over 10 years old and can't possibly be considered still in warranty. It turns out it will (most likely) just cost me the shipping cost of the gun to Texas. Wow!

The shipping isn't cheap. I'm not sure who made the rule but handguns require overnight shipping and with the additional insurance the total was $77.55. The gun arrived at the STI factory yesterday. I'm hoping to have it back by next weekend.

I shoot a STI gun in competition, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

If I were 30 years younger and in the market for a mate she sounds very nice:

She likes long walks on the beach, men who aren't afraid to cry, and puppies.

Her dislikes include feed tray stoppages, tracer flareout of her NVGs and premature fixed-wing strikes scattering her high-value targets.

(Via email from Carl, my first formal firearms instructor).

Yesterday afternoon I spent some time cleaning up the garage (not that anyone other than family could tell if they were to take a look at it even now). I sorted all the mixed caliber brass and put a batch of .40 S&W in the case cleaner. I figured I would take it out after supper. I forgot about it and instead of the usual two hours in the Dillion CV-750 it spent about 12 hours.

I now have some very shiny brass.

Update: Kris (in comments) wanted pictures.

See also the .300 Winchester Magnum brass I put in Sunday Morning:

My old link to this was broken so I had to go looking for it and thought I would share.

It's a Classifer Calculator for USPSA stages. If you know your hit factor [(Points - Penalities)/Time] for shooting a stage then it will compute what percentage of the best shooters in the world your score represents. This percentage is used to calculate your classification. I'm considered a B-class shooter. The percentage ranges and classifications are:

Grand Master 95 to 100%
Master 85 to 94.9%
A  75 to 84.9%
B  60 to 74.9%
C  40 to 59.9%
D  2 to 40%

The USPSA will compute your percentage and post it on their website a week or two after your club sends in the results but if you want to know sooner you can use the Classifier Calculator to get the answer immediately.

Using Caleb's recent practice result I compute his hit factor at 7.8717 which yields 72.878% in the Limited Division. If he can do this consistently on a number of different stages in competition he is an upper B-class shooter.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

George Bernard Shaw
See also here, for further background on this phrase. The original was not "The road to hell is paved..." but Hell itself that was paved.
[I'm thinking gun control, TSA, socialized medicine, "affordable housing", "hate speech" laws, rent control, the list is, for all practical purposes endless. See also New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.

I just bought Bat Out Of Hell so I could play it while posting this and doing my dry-fire practice.--Joe]

Via email from Ed:

Jul 28, 2009 6:06pm
Eastside Harley and Wades Guns in Bellevue will be starting a promo via the internet. When a customer purchases a new 2009 big twin Harley from now through the end of July (could go into August), they will get a $500 voucher towards a purchase of a firearm or merchandise at Wades Guns. This offer is internet-only promotion, share and pass this audio file along. We are also posting a video to www.eastsideharley.com.

Bellevue Washington, near Seattle.

I tried this before, but the camera/recorder I used then was equipped with AGC circuitry, and the extremely wide dynamic range of gunfire made for an unsatisfactory result.  This time I used a dedicated, stereo sound recorder with no compression.

Because the sound of live fire, even from the 400 yard distance in this example, has such a wide dynamic range, you need to crank up your speaker volume very high.  You'll need a high quality sound system, or some good headphones with good frequency response, from low bass to the upper highs.  You should be able to clearly hear the sound of the rushing creek in the distance between shots, and the high-frequency bullet crack should almost hurt your ears.  Warning;  Make absolutely sure your computer or other device isn't going to make any other sounds (chimes, alarms, etc.) or it will blow your head off.  Be sure to turn the volume down when you're done.  When I play these files on the Altec speaker system with sub woofer, it sounds like it did when I was standing there making the recording.

We fired an AR-15 (.223) from 400 yards at plastic water jugs.  You can hear the sound of impact, but it's not as loud as the bullet's sonic "crack" or the low frequency muzzle blast that follows.  I was holding the recorder at a position behind a hill from the shooter, about 20 yards off to the side of the bullet path, and about 20 yards up-range from the targets.  This is the same recording in both WMA and MP3 formats;

01 223FireWMA.wma (1.4 MB)

223FireMp3.mp3 (584.91 KB)

Note that you've probably never heard this sound in movies or television, with the possible exception of Quigley Down Under, but in that case Quigley's bullets were sub sonic well before impact at long range and we can forgive the "whoosh-boom" as being probably accurate enough.

Last night when Barb came home from work she told me that Mrs. Petersen was in the hospital. She was Barb's patient and she had talked and talked about how much her late husband had loved guns and how much being able to host the Lewiston Pistol Club on a small patch of their land meant to him. He loved to shoot and he knew it was important to have a safe place to shoot. The Lewiston Pistol Club, and before that the Palouse Practical Shooters, have been using his land at no charge for over 10 years now.

Barb suggested I bring some flowers and a card to the hospital and stop and chat for a while. Since there was a steel match out at the range today I bought a card before I headed out.

Just as I turned off the engine at the range Barb called and asked, "Have you left yet?" "Uhh... yes", I answered. "Do you have your camera with you?" Again I answered "Yes." "Mrs. Petersen would like a picture of the range sign that mentions her husbands name." I was relieved. Nothing tough or involving a trip back into town causing me to be late for the match.

I took my gear, camera, and the card to the group of people prepping for the match and told them the story. Most of them knew her husband and everyone knew how much having access to that land means to the shooting community. They signed the card and some agreed to pose for the picture after the match.

I took pictures of people shooting (and without me knowing it someone used my own camera to take a picture of me when I was shooting! Thanks to whoever you are!) and the sign.

When I got back into town I had four 8"x10" prints made and delivered them and the card to Mrs. Petersen. It was the first time I had met her. As Adam (Club President for several years) had said many times, and Barb told me just today, she is a very sweet woman. She was appreciative of the card and picture and told me about her daughter who loves to shoot and her grandson who now has one of her late husbands rifles and needs someone to teach him to shoot since he lost his father and both grandfathers. I'll be forwarding the contact info on to the instructors in the club.

Here are the pictures I made prints of:

Adam and Jackie (new shooter at her first match!)

Don B., K.W.H., and Mike B.

The range in use.

Don B., K.W.H., Mike B., Adam M., Don W., Josh A.

I didn't make a print of this picture but since I don't get that many pictures of myself shooting I include it here.

K.W.H. and Joe Huffman

The US forest service has done extensive study on bear behavior, OC for bears, and guns against bears. I have been involved in all aspects of that from the beginning.

Almost everything you hear or read is personal opinion based on either no or very limited data points.

Looking at all the data for 100 years presents a very different story.

For bear defense it cannot be shown that the type or caliber matters, people that shoot back with anything win, people that don't shoot back many times lose. All calibers and action types have been used. Handguns are almost always used at mauling distance. Longarms at 25 yards to dead at your feet.

There is no evidence to support 44 over 357, revolvers are more reliable at contact distance but people have won with semi-autos (but the data pool is very small, as it grows we would at some point start to see malfunctions).

A good revolver in 357 or 44 with powerful solids made to go deep and not deflect is probably the best answer for carry. The pump shotgun still has more kills of grizzly than anything in defense, believe it or not with OO buck, though common wisdom nowadays is use brenneke slugs. Pre WWII 90%+ of the kills were OO.

Greg Hamilton
June 04, 2009 5:15 PM
Handguns for Bear?
Email to the Insights Training List.
[Very interesting! Data is always better than speculation. But I have to wonder how many "lost" data points there are. Cases where someone shot the bear and still ended up as snack food might not be represented in the data set.--Joe]

If I had a TV and cable I might actually watch an episode or two of this:

LOCK 'N LOAD is a six-part reality series offering viewers a fly on the wall experience at "The Shootist" gun store in Englewood, Colorado. Salesman Josh T. Ryan is always in full-on pitch mode and for every gun sold by this expert gunslinger at this family-owned store, there's a fascinating story and a fascinating buyer.

LOCK 'N LOAD doesn't take sides or argue a political perspective. Instead, viewers on both sides of the issue will be able to watch Ryan, a born salesman, wield his patented quick-draw humor and inherent likeability in each exchange, making jokes and big-ticket deals over the blasts echoing from the firing range down below. And all is done before hidden cameras which will only be revealed after the transaction is completed in order to insure a particularly candid and compelling point of view. America is and will probably always be fascinated with the gun culture in our country and this show will help to explain why.

Maybe I can watch them on-line. The promos are intriguing.

Sebastian has a post up about Tall Tales of High-Power Shooting which I started to comment on but got a little carried away and decided to make a post out of it.

I remember showing a 100 yard target to some co-workers. I put four groups on it. Each group was a little under one inch in size with most of the holes touching. The groups were arranged in a square about 10 inches on a side. One guy held it up to his chest, smiled, and said, "Pretty good. If we were on opposite ends of a football field I would be in trouble if you were shooting at me." I raised an eyebrow and another co-worker laughed at him and explained, "At 100 yards he can put every shot into your eyeball." The first guy went white and was skeptical and it took a minute or so of convincing that it was even possible.

After I had shot a little bit of pistol I heard about IPSC.

Within a year I was shooting better than what I would have thought was humanly possible when I first started. Really, now. Who could possibly be facing away from three humanoid targets ten yards away, hands in surrender position, then turn, draw, fire two rounds of each target, reload, then fire two more rounds on each target--all in under nine seconds? A turn, a draw, 12 shots, and a reload all in under nine seconds? It's got to take at least one second for each shot making the total much more than that, right? Wrong. The stage is called El Presidente. The last time I did it in competition it took me 6.94 seconds (with one miss).

What is even more interesting to me is that I was shooting better than the best shooters in the world of 30 years prior. Equipment has improved some but mostly it's the technique that has improved.

Even though I know, probably much better than most, all the math, physics, etc. involved and I've done it multiple times under different conditions I'm still amazed at putting the first round on target from 1000 yards away. When I point out objects that are 800 or 1000 yards away to people to aid explaining this they get this look on their face like I was talking about being abducted by aliens.

I am of the opinion all politicians should observe a 1000 yard match prior to taking office with a short refresher course on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and a reminder that they are servants of the people. I'm mostly joking when I suggest that prior to running for a second term they have to have an apple shot off of their head by a random pick of volunteer constituents from 100 yards away. Third term it's a plum. Fourth term it's a grape. Fifth term, well... we just shoot the politician. I think it would remind them to not let their power go to their heads lest someone else let something go to their head.

It's been up for less than a year and there aren't many guns there yet. But it's free to both sellers and buyers. GunListings.org.

The View From North Central Idaho currently comes in at number seven. But there are a lot of gun blogs not listed.

It's no surprise that Say Uncle comes in at #1.

H/T to Say Uncle and Traction Control.

I'm finally settled into my new hidden, underground, hardened, bunker well enough to make a few blog posts. That doesn't mean I'm all caught up reading everyone else's blogs and commenting on all the things I would have liked to comment on.

It was more work than I expected. It's amazing how much stuff a pack-rat can accumulate in 3.5 years in one place. I did throw a bunch of stuff away--which helps some in the new place.

It turns out it's a 15 minute walk to work instead of a 10 minute walk but that isn't bad. It makes it easier for Barb to have lunch with me when she is over here too.

Barb did a lot of the work and has her nest in the corner mostly configured the way she wants it. We still have to buy a few things that we shared in the common kitchen in the old bunker.

One thing that is surprising is how much moisture is in the air of the new bunker. I never needed to use the dehumidifier in the old one. This one started smelling wet after just a couple days. I turned on the dehumidifier and it's pulling out about two gallons of water from the air each day. The humidity dropped from 60% to, as of this minute, 48%. This is probably acceptable.

After learning that the Bellevue police have been fully informed on open carry I decided to do that a bit on an experimental basis during the move and then extended it into my normal activies in the parking lot of not only the bunker but of banks and the mall. There have been no problems so far. I think a couple of teenage girls in the parking lot noticed as they and (I presume) their mother were moving in nearby. The mother gave me a smile and said, "Hi" as she got into her pickup the next time I made a trip with my arms full of boxes from the Jeep in the parking lot down the stairs to the bunker. But other than that there have not been any reactions that I have noticed.

Tonight another women was moving in and she might have seen the gun as well. She smiled and said hi before she had an opportunity to see it. I didn't look back after I walked by so I don't know she did see it or had a reaction. The license plate on her car is from California so she might not think it was so cool to see someone packing in public! If I see her running for cover and/or concealment when I come to the surface I'll know she has an adverse opinion of gun owners.

An interesting development:

The TASER® XREP™ is a self-contained, wireless electronic control device (ECD), that deploys from a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. It delivers a similar Neuro Muscular Incapacitation (NMI) bio-effect as our handheld TASER® X26™ ECD, but can be delivered to a maximum effective range of 100 feet (30.48 meters), combining blunt impact force. The battery supply is fully integrated into the chassis and provides the power to drive the XREP projectile engine.

Links to pictures here. Video here.

I wonder if I can get a couple of boxes of those from Wal-Mart. I could see having few rounds available if I ever got an invitation to go bird hunting with Dick Cheney and he got a little out of control again.

Via email from Kris.

I'm just wondering aloud here.  When will we decide that women are regular citizens, instead of treating female shooters as though they are a separate class of citizen?  I understand that there is a perception that women need their own, separate training classes and all that, so they feel comfortable.  Is that condescending to women or am I missing something?  At what point, or under what circumstances, will we be treating female shooters the same as we treat male shooters (within the sport I mean)?

Maybe it's a dumb question.  Maybe men can't help but see a woman as something special and maybe that attitude is bound to find its way into our chosen sport.  Maybe some women are so accustomed to being treated differently that they expect it without a lot of thought.

Maybe the question is simply premature.  Any female shooters want to comment on that?  Do you believe you need separate training or separate categories in a competition, and if so, why?  Should there be guns made for girls, and others for the boys and if so, why"  Marketing strategies are beyond the scope of the question.  Hell, maybe it's all about marketing, in which case, never mind.

I could understand if shooting involved some heavy lifting, but even then we've all seen some women who can out-lift some men.  So you want different weight classes, like in wrestling?

Here's another.  How long is it going to be before the various races of humans are treated the same in general, in the media, and in the courts?  I understand personal preferences, but that's quite different.  I'm talking socially, politically and legally.  When will I be able to tell a black guy he's being a fool without being accused of racism, or tell a Mexican woman she's wrong without her getting in my face on some racial or sex-related tangent?  When will we be able to disagree without changing the subject as a form of crutch?  I really am getting sick and damned tired of this, so I am herein putting my foot down.  Knock off the race and sex defenses.  Some people are using it as a tool and I'm not buying it.  Not at all, and I'm getting right back in your face if you try it with me so don't even start.

When, or under what exact specified circumstances, will the gun-restriction advocates declare their work done, pack up their tents, and get jobs?  Any time you hear one of them guffaw over the assertion that they won't quit until all guns are banned, your immediate response must be, "OK, then tell me precisely when or under what circumstances you will stop, declare victory, and find something else to do, 'cause what I see is that any time you get a win, you're right on to calling for another restriction.  This has been happening for over 70 years, so, you know, we have a pretty undeniable track record here.  Go ahead.  Lay out the circumstances.  I have all day."

Staying on the title subject;
A problem with saying, "this far and no farther" is you've already established that a) you're willing to give ground, and/or that b) you've accepted or granted your opponent's basic premise(s).  Some things are properly subject to compromise (such as where to go for lunch, assuming you want the company) and others are not (such as basic rights).  When it comes to basic rights, the response it not, "this far and no farther".  Properly, the response is zero tolerance, same as it would be for a robber or a rapist.  If someone violates your basic rights, they are criminal and it is not incumbent upon you to prove your magnanimity by compromising with them.  You fight to win, then you fight for compensation and restitution, then you fight for justice, assuming your opponent is still breathing.  Few if any in Congress, for example, seem to have a clue how that might happen with regard to their violations of our basic rights.

I think the Russians are catching on to this capitalism thing:

Pirate Hunting Cruises Being Offered in Russia

Pirate hunting cruises along the African coast are being offered by private yachts in Russia. For £3,500 per day customers can sail along the coast of Somalia at low speed to entice a pirate into attacking.

Former special forces troops are on board to make sure no harm comes to the wealthy punters. If a pirate does take the bait, they are met with machine gun, rocket, and grenade fire. For an extra fee, customers can hire an AK-47 and join in.

[Via an email from son-in-law Caleb.]

I wonder what caused someone to do this search:

Domain Name		usbr.gov ? (U.S. Government)
IP Address		140.214.41.# (Department of Interior)
ISP		Department of Interior
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  California City  :  Shasta Lake Lat/Long  :  40.6893, -122.3768 (Map) Distance  :  495 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; InfoPath.1)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1680 x 1050 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jun 19 2009 11:00:01 pm
Last Page View		Jun 19 2009 11:00:01 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.bing.com/...danger&go=&form=QBRE
Search Engine		bing.com
Search Words		tannerite fire danger
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...ory,Boomershoot.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...ory,Boomershoot.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Jun 19 2009 11:00:01 pm
Visit Number		531,582

The Department of Interior did a search at 2300 on a Friday night for "tannerite fire danger". Tannerite, as most of you know, is a binary explosive used for reactive targets. It is frequently assumed that Boomershoot uses Tannerite. This is not true. We use Boomerite.

Nearly every year we have one or more fires associated with Boomershoot we have to put out. Most of the time it is because we are doing fireball targets. Sometimes it has been because a tracer caused a fire. But sometimes it was because our reactive target either caught fire instead of detonating after being shot or because the explosives spontaneously combusted. One of the ingredients in Boomerite is potassium chlorate. Potassium chlorate is one of the main ingredients in matches. It is believed it is the potassium chlorate that causes Boomerite to spontaneously combust. Tannerite (the last time I checked) does not use potassium chlorate although it does share ammonium nitrate with Boomerite. I suspect Tannerite is less likely to cause a fire than Boomerite but any time you are working with highly exothermic materials the risk of a fire or explosion is present.

If you use highly exothermic materials in association with your gun fun please be careful with it. Be prepared to put out a fire. If you spill some of the materials then dispose of it by soaking the area in water or dispersing and burying the chemicals.

We don't want the Department of Interior or anyone else banning the use of Tannerite on their land.

Checker asked about my Boomershoot shirt, then asked how far I think I could shoot. Maybe answering in kilometers was a bad idea.

thumper242
Via Twitter, June 19, 2009
[thumper242 has attended many Boomershoots and has been a valued staff member for many years now. BTW, he uses a .300 Win Mag shooting Black Hills Match ammo.--Joe]

Ry (and here) and Say Uncle reported on the U.S. Army ordering 38.4 million rounds of .300 Winchester magnum ammo for their newly modified M-24 sniper rifles.

I think quite highly of the .300 Win Mag as a long range precision rifle cartridge. That is what my Spud Gun is chambered in. I have been very, very pleased with the results I get with it. I also find it interesting the link Ry supplied to the development history reports the Federal Match primers are used in the new ammo--which is what I use when reloading for my Spud Gun. They are using a 220 grain Sierra Match King bullet however. They considered and rejected the 210 grain VLD bullet which is what I use for reloading. The moly coated 190 grain Sierra Match King is used in the Black Hills match ammo I sometimes buy which also works very well for me. I prefer the 210 VLD over the 190 SMK because I get a little less wind drift and I should be good for 1500 yard shots versus 1300 yards for the 190 SMK (at sea level, 59F).

I'm glad I have enough ammo to last me until (I hope) the Army contracts are fulfilled.

Population pre-event, fifteen million. Population post-event, ten million and dropping. Four Operatives. My share of the initial casualty count was one million, two hundred and fifty fucking thousand people. The number was meaningless except as a strategic calculation and a sick, horrible comment percolated thorough my thoughts.

I. Am. A. Weapon. Of. Mass. Destruction.

Kenneth Chinran
A character in the book The Weapon, Page 440.
By Michael Z. Williamson
[A few days after I made this post on April 1 2008 Freehold and The Weapon showed up on my desk at work courtesy of Tony. As Jim said, "Joe, if you haven't read Freehold and The Weapon by Michael Z. Williamson you really ought to, they describe your 'April Fools' scenario almost to a T."

I don't have much time for reading dead tree stuff but I put these books on the top of my stack. I finished Freehold in about three or four months and I currently have only a handful of pages left on The Weapon. They are very good books. Had I decided to take the time they would have been the type of book I would have read straight through stopping only to tell Barb to leave me alone--I really didn't need to eat or sleep yet.

Being an engineer I would have liked more detail on some things. But being a good engineer I can figure out the details for myself should I have the need.

Sleep well.--Joe]

I received the same email that Kevin did abut he got a post up before me so just head over to his place to see how to order this great shirt. Both of my daughters requested one and now proudly wear them.

Ry, I'll match that and raise you several magazines of tracers and about 100 people.

Any range I have ever been to would ban for life any of the people for their gun handling seen in this video (via email from Rob):

I'm all for having fun with guns but we can do it with much lower risk.

Via the Steel Challenge Shooting Association:

I listened to all (I only had time for half of #7 which I had previously heard) the Vicious Circle podcasts on my way to/from Idaho this weekend. The most common topic is guns with some porn and technology discussions thrown in. My kind of stuff!

With very little structure, mediocre production quality, and a fair amount of rambling it's never going to win any awards. But I enjoyed it. It certainly was much better than merely listening to road noise.

In some episodes (especially #8, We be hating) it sort of reminded me of gossipy Jr. High girls whispering to each other about someone else behind their back. And then there was another than made perhaps a few too many "short jokes" for me to be entirely comfortable with it (and I'm not short). But there wasn't really anything I hadn't said in private conversations before. But I wouldn't make those sort of conversations public.

I'll be adding more to my Zune as they come out for further entertainment while on the road.

Full disclosure:

#7, Boomershoot 2009, was very favorable about Boomershoot. Late in #5 a favorable mention of somethings I have said appears to be at least partial inspiration for episode #6. I think there was another favorable mention or two of me in some of the episodes as well.

I don't believe these significantly affected my opinion of the podcasts but I thought you should know they might have.

If bans actually worked and guns were not available you would see more of this (warning--it's very graphic!).

How fast can you draw and fire a shot? How much distance can an attacker cover in the same amount of time?

In answer to the first question 1.5 seconds is a reasonable estimate for most people. 21 feet is the answer to the second. Draw your conclusions and modify your behaviors appropriately.

Boomershoot ended as quickly as it began. It only felt like a few hours, but it was most of the day. I guess time flies when you're blowing shit up.

ErnestThing
May 11, 2009
Boomershoot 2009
[Yeah, time does seem to fly during Boomershoot. I sometimes worry that people aren't getting their money's worth out of the event because it's all over so fast. But people start leaving before I call the final ceasefire so I can't be that much of a spoil sport.--Joe]

ALWAYS take at least one knife to a gunfight, just in case you run out of spare mags.

Evelyn Logan
5/28/2009
From the email list NRAInstructorsRKBA.
[Good point. You don't have to reload a knife. But as I heard Greg Hamilton once say, "If I run out of ammo there will be lots of unused guns and ammo on the ground for me to pick up."--Joe]

Via email from Jason comes this link to a proposal for a one mile range in central Washington State.

It sounds like they are talking greater than .30 caliber. My hottest loads with the highest BC bullets in my .300 Win Mag won't meet the requirement of being supersonic at the target.

For those of you that want to run the numbers yourself assume range conditions of 400 feet above sea level and 75F.

Via email from friend and co-worker Kris comes this nifty bit of history and an alternate use for your rifle stock.

One of the people participating at Boomershoot this year was a U.K. citizen. Via Facebook I found out the following:

I Got a call from the cops at 2300 last night, suggesting that I haven't been shooting my guns enough.

It was the UK police on the phone, calling my US cel number. I have a UK firearms certificate - one of the requirements to keep my UK firearms certificate is that I must shoot every 12 months, and my UK rifle club just reported that I hadn't done so... I told them that I've definitely shot in the past 12 months, so now I need to send them proof. This is, actually, the least surreal part of this experience.

So... in the land where handguns are banned and long guns are severely restricted the cops will call you and threaten to take away your firearms certificate if you haven't been shooting enough.

Since I knew he had been shooting three inch square boxes filled with explosives dangling from paracord nearly 700 yards away just a three weeks ago I offered to confirm his story. He said if he needed my help he would let me know.

Little Abigail Wyoming and her inheritance.

I couldn't be in Phoenix with all the cool kids so I went to all the stores in town that sold ammunition and/or components. Here is what I found:

• Walmart
  • Shotgun primers only
  • A little bit of brass and I bought all the .45 ACP brass they had
  • Virtually no handgun ammo
  • Virtually no powder
• Tri-State
  • Lots of rifle and shotgun ammo
  • Lots of .40 S&W ammo
  • Three boxes of .45 ACP ammo but I bought two of them adhering to Tamara's etiquette
  • Don't carry reloading components
• Big Five
  • Don't carry reloading components
  • Virtually no handgun ammo
  • Some rifle ammo
• Sure Shot
• Lots of powder
• Lots of used 9mm and .40 S&W brass
• Shotgun primers only
• Virtually no handgun ammo
• Some rifle ammo

About half of Tri-State's rifle ammo and in the foreground 2/3s of the .45 ACP ammo for sale in the city.

Apparently Barb called ahead for me. But I didn't see any gun I really wanted except for the AR-50A1 and there was no indication Barb would allow me to buy the ammo to feed it.

Sure Shot had lots of powder and 9mm and .40 S&W brass.

Sebastian, Kevin, and others were quoted in the Christian Science Monitor today after being interviewed last night in Phoenix.

Bitter pulled The Josh Sugarmann Endorsement out of that article.

Great job guys! It makes me wish, even more, that I was there.

The pictures from Kevin create a great longing in me.

Over the years I've been reading that a little bit of alcohol is good for your health. I, basically, don't drink at all so it could be said that I was risking my health by not drinking. Not wanting to risk my health over something that was fairly easily remedied I decided maybe I would drink just a little bit every once in a while.

Red wine seems to get lots of nods from the medical researchers so I bought a bottle a couple months ago. I opened it up and had a small glass, maybe six ounces, tonight with my dinner.

I then started working on the mathematics for a nifty new way to do range estimation. I had an exceedingly difficult time doing the simplest of math problems. It wasn't even algebra. It was simple ratios. Things that are normally intuitively obvious to me required that I work out several example in order to find the general equation. I think I finally got it but it must have taken me at least four times as long as normal and I don't really trust my work.

No more wine for me except when it's strictly a social situation. Why drink if it's going to make me brain dead for the evening?

I've long been disgusted by Hollywood's portrayal of sounds.  Sounds in space, sound traveling at the speed of light, and the ridiculous sounds of gunfire made up in a studio.  Even the news services will often do a time-shift, to synchronize the sound of a distant event with the video even though anyone who's been alive long enough to understand what they're seeing on TV knows that sound and light travel at different rates.  I just, do, not, get why TV and movie people have to screw up reality so much.  Far from adding anything, it subtracts from the final product.

For example, I think the long delay in the sound of a distant explosion at Boomershoot makes the experience more awesome.  It adds to the perception of enormity.  The movie, "Band of Brothers" is an attempt to show it like it really was, and for the most part they seem to have done a good job.  Not when it comes to sound editing though.  Super-sonic bullets whiz by, "whoosh-whoosh, zip, zip" and so on, and of course the sound always travels at the speed of light.  It's taking a serious subject and turning it into slapstick.

In the interest of universal understanding, I made this recording of .308 rifle fire from about 380 yards while setting up some rifles for Boomershoot.  The camera is about 20 yards from the targets (yeah, I was holding the camera, but I was behind a hill from the gun and in radio communication with the shooter-- completely safe).  Each shot delivers multiple sonic effects or events.  First is the "CRACK-hiss" (mini sonic boom) from the bullet.  Take the sonic boom from a jet flying over, speed it up a few octaves, and you'll have about the same thing.  That bit is interesting in that it does not come from the gun, but from the bullet.  You have no sense of the direction from which the bullet came.  Imagine standing in the water on the shore of a lake and feeling the wake from a passing boat on your legs.  From that sensation alone, you have no idea of where the boat came from, and little or no information about its direction of travel.  The bullet's wake, as sound, gives you no more information-- just a "snap" that seems to come from nowhere.  Next is the sound of impact, which is only audible in the first shot in this recording.  Then comes the "boom" from the muzzle blast, followed by the reverberation in the surrounding hills and trees.

Note that the reverb almost seems louder than the crack-boom.  That's due to the AGC (Automatic Gain Control) circuitry, A.K.A. "compression" built into the camera.  The initial crack drives circuitry into gain reduction, and the gain comes back up for the reverb.  To get the relative levels of the events portrayed accurately, I'll have to take a full-range stereo recorder into the field on another day and use its un-compressed level mode.  If you have some nice speakers (and pretty powerful, as the dynamic range is quite wide) you’ll hear it as if you were actually standing there.  Regular CD audio has a dynamic range of about 100dB, IIRC-- close enough.  This recording isn’t all that bad, though.  Crank up the volume, use good speakers, and boost the bass to get the full effect (the mini electret mic on the camera isn’t great for bass response);

This year I decided to have a Boomershoot Gun Blogger Day. If you were a gun blogger you could show up on Thursday and get a behind the scenes tour and help (with the proper ATF paperwork) or watch the explosives being made. As it turned out most of it consisted of me standing around and telling stories. I had hoped they would have some fun ideas for doing things with the explosives like putting them in the water and/or mud, making craters, or blowing holes in old logs or some such thing. But everyone seemed to have a good time anyway, even after putting out the fire from the fireball demo.

Here is the list of Boomershoot Gun Bloggers and their posts about the event who were in attendence for at least part of Boomershoot (arranged by their shooting position on the line):

• Ry Jones (#1)
  • Moment of detonation
  • What can we learn from that?
  • Boomershoot Day 2
  • Calm down kthx
  • Somewhere, Petrdoubt is crying.
  • Made it back.
  • Boomershoot Sunday
  • Next year, it will be harder.
  • New worst injury at Boomershoot
  • Tango Down CS
• Benjamin (#2)
• Lyle at UltiMAK (#4, co-blogger here with me)
• Alan Andrews (#20)
  • Boomershoot Gun Blogger Day
  • Easy Shot
  • Boomershoot 2009 Fireball
  • Boomershoot Slacking
  • View from the hotel room window - Orofino, ID
  • Welcome to Orofino
  • The OTHER squeee! you heard was me.
  • Boomershoot 2009 - The Day
  • Through the Scope at Boomershoot 2009
  • Shooting the Anvil - Boomershoot 2009
  • Looking down on Orofino, ID
  • Dam!
  • Bloggers At Boomershoot 2009
• ErnestThing (#25)
  • Boomershoot 2009 (Added May 11, 22:10)
• JD (#25)
  • Boomershoot
  • bit of this, bit of that
  • I’ll just leave this here…
  • T-Minus
  • T-Minus (yes, a different post with the same title)
  • Boomershoot - Take Off, 4/22
  • Consternation
  • Boomershoot 4/23 - Media Day
  • Hardware
  • Boomershoot - Field Fire
  • Boomershoot Main Event
  • postcard
• Derek (#26)
  • Did I forget anything?
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Travel Day 1
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Travel Day 2, Arrival
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Day 3, Gun Blogger Day
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Day 4
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Day 5
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Day 6
  • Boomershoot 2009 – Day 7
• David (#27)
  • Boomershoot Prep Pics
  • More Boomershoot Prep
  • Less than 12 hours to go…
  • Boomershoot Dinner Raffle Prize
  • Back from Boomershoot
  • New Office Decoration
  • My Favorite Boomershoot 2009 Photo So Far
  • Trib Update
  • Triggerfinger and the Boomer Everyone’s Talking About
  • How I Broke Squeaky’s Nose
  • Derek and his prize from the Boomershoot Dinner raffle
• Bonnie (#29, sort of, she left early Sunday morning and someone else took her position)
  • Things DID happen. But first, a post about Boomershoot.
  • GAH.
  • Home.
  • Boomershoot 2009 - Epic Post #1 (Wednesday/Thursday)
  • Yes, I broke my nose. No, I don’t look like someone beat me up.
  • Spokane to Orofino
  • Friday
  • Boomershoot 2009 - Epic Post #2 (Friday)
  • THE NOSE STORY. *UPDATED* with David’s side of things.
  • Party Foul at Trib’s Place
  • The last of the photos people actually care about…
  • The long ride home.
• Aaron Neal (#50)
  • Home from Boomershoot '09
  • Some Boomershoot stuff
  • Boomershoot - the Journey
  • Boomershoot - the good stuff
  • Boomershoot - More Good Stuff
  • Boomershoot - Ponderings and People
  • Boomershoot - More Good Folks
• Barron Barnett (#54)
  • Boomershoot 2009
• Matthew (#61)
  • It's off to see the Wizard...
  • Boomershoot 2009: Media Day
  • Boomershoot 2009: Precision Rifle Clinic Day 1
  • Boomershoot 2009 High Intensity Event
  • Boomershoot 2009: Opening Ceremonies
  • Boomershoot 2009: Boomers with handguns
  • Launching the Anvil
• Kevin Baker (#74)
  • Another Trip to the Range
  • Range Report: I've Got My Boomershoot Load
  • If Someone Had Told Me a Year Ago...
  • Oh Thank Jeebus, We're Here!
  • How Cool is THIS?
  • Quick Post
  • Travel Report
  • HOME!
  • BOOMERSHOOT!
• George (#75)
  • Twi-nighter?
  • In crew rest
  • Boomblogging I
  • Boomerblogger II
  • Boomerfreezing III
  • Boomerblogging IV - Send it!
  • Boomershooting for real, Ch. V
  • Boomershoot wrap-up
  • Boomershoot photo post
• Earl
  • if I wanted to see the West, just go East
  • If I knew it all I wouldn't be on the road and so alive!
  • It's already Saturday, my library is closed...
  • Sometimes I really do well, and others...
  • Upon Reflection I am not as represented...
• Bill Waite
• Kris
  • Photo Friday
• Xenia Joy (Official Boomershoot photographer)
  • Day 217
  • - 365
  • - 365 (yes, another post with the same title)
• Joe Huffman (Boomershoot Event Director)

Thanks to all the bloggers that attended, posted wonderful stuff, and took thousands of pictures.

If I've overlooked a blogger or some posts let me know and I'll make the corrections. Thanks.

Update: I've made a couple updates since the original posting. I added a section for Kris and another post to Aaron's list.

Update2: I added a link to ErnestThing's (#25) post.

Update3: I added some more links from Matthew (#61).

Update4 (May 18): Another link to Aaron Neal's list of posts (#50).

There is talk in this post (and some behind the scenes email) about having a "Gun Blogger Invitational" match. There is a poll on Caleb's post and lots of comments. Robb Allen has his own thoughts on the topic as well.

Check them out and give your own suggestions.

I think a “Cache” is two, an “Arsenal” is 2-4, a “Stockpile” is 3-5, and an “Armory” is more than 4. The confusion stems from the fact that there is an overlap, for example, a “Stockpile” can also be an “Armory” OR an “Arsenal”. As for me, I’m going for the much heralded status of “Third World Military Power”, which is 20 or more and includes reloading equipment or at the very least “Warlord” status, which is more than 10.

Matt Groom
Comment to More than a cache?
May 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
[This reminds me of about 10 or 12 years ago when a bunch of us gun nuts at Microsoft started referring to each others homes as "compounds" and buying a few bricks of .22 rim-fire ammo as "resupplying our arsenal". This was because of the way the press treated gun owners. Times have not changed much.--Joe]

Robb tells us about a stage from hell he shot in last weekend. I also shot a tough stage yesterday but it wasn't entirely because of the stage design. And strangely enough both of our stages were "Stage 5" in the match.

Do you notice anything wrong with this gun?

Update: A close up of the broken safety.

People familiar with 1911s and sharp eyes will notice the safety is in the ON position but the hammer is down. This can't happen on a normal 1911. It turns out the ambi safety was broken but I didn't know that when I inserted a magazine and racked the slide to "Make Ready" for the stage. The tip of the safety ripped a trench through the end of my left index finger. It bled profusely.

We didn't really understand why my finger got ripped open and after getting a band-aid I went ahead and shot the stage.

The stage was unusual. The shooter had to traverse between two barricades in the shape of a U with ports in both sides. There were targets on the sides, bottom, and the interior of the U.

Since it was a 38 round stage even with my 18 rounds magazines I had to change magazines during the course of the stage. At the far side of the U, shooting into the interior of the U at targets near the ground from a high perspective my bullets impacted the ground on the other side of the U in the shooters path--the path I had just traversed.

Good shot, huh?

Despite a mutilated finger and destroying a magazine I did pretty well on that stage:

Update: My verbal description of the stage wasn't very good. Here is a rough drawing of what it looked like:

There were ports in most of the walls. I started on the left side of the U and dropped a magazine about half way down that side. I went around to the other side and shot through the port at the target on the left side of the interior of the U. The bullet passed through the paper target and hit my magazine which I had dropped on the other side.

Just a hint of the current situation on primers from Powder Valley, Inc.:

At this time we are not taking any new backorders for primers that are not listed here. We currently have over 50 million primers on backorder. If you currently have a backorder in place your order will be processed as primers become available. Once we begin receiving more primers from the manufacturers and are able to begin filling current backorders we will update the website.

Via Kevin on the Lewiston Pistol Club email list.

For the last two years I have been trying to increase target production and once I felt I had excess capacity I was going to get the cat (bulldozer) out there to expand the shooting line so I could handle more shooters.

This year we finished target production with more targets per unit time than ever before. And we had many targets left over after the event even though we had more shooting hours than usual. And I shut down target production at 1500 on Saturday. We finally have the target production up to a level where we could handle more shooting positions.

That was the plan. But it turns out there are other limits to our capacity that became (more) obvious this year.

• Target placement. Even after doubling the space at the tree line we have room for about 500 targets there. That is just barely adequate. We had 350 targets on the hillside which was about right. I don't think we can safely expand either target location without moving a lot of dirt.
• The Saturday night dinner maxed out the Ponderosa last year with about 65 people. They claim they can handle 100 but with our setup for the raffle 65 was crowded. The VFW building had more space but we had 93 people sign up for dinner this year and we maxed them out too. There is one other place in town that has more space but they are already booked for the last weekend of April 2010. It might be that we can rent the high school cafeteria or some such place but I haven't looked into that. I can also get the caterer to set up tents and tables and do it on-site for a fairly reasonable charge. But cringe at the thought of trying to do that in a 30 MPH wind with snow and hail coming down like we have had some years.
• The caterer for the Sunday lunch asked if we could break the shooters into two groups, say positions 1 through 38 and 39 through 76 and send them to the roach coach about 30 minutes apart and take 90 minutes total for lunch. There are just too many people for them to handle in a timely manner.

After talking to Barb about it for a bit (she is the one that attempts to inject some pessimism/reality into my visions) I think expanding the shooting line capacity would be the wrong thing to do. I should improve the experience for the existing shooters instead. The most obvious thing to do in that regard is to make improvements to the shooters berm. It is too uneven and doesn't have enough depth in places.

Another possibility is to make it easier to quickly put up more dingle berries. Many more...

My wife reads a lot of "who dunnit" mystery novels.  The one she's reading now addresses long-range marksmanship and the use of hollowpoint "match" bullets.  As a person normally 100% uninterested guns and shooting, she had a very good question for me; "Why do they use hollowpoints for accuracy"?  This lead to a very interesting discussion-- one uninterested in guns was trying to understand something that few gun enthusiasts understand completely and rarely discuss in such detail.

I had to admit I was at something of a loss.  My best understanding is that the hollowpoint bullet jacket can be manufactured to higher standards of concentricity (the mass being better centered around the mechanical center so as to avoid wobble in flight) and consistency of mass and shape.  That is all true, but exactly why it is true I was at a loss to explain with certainty.  My best guesses are that it has to do with the process of forming the jacket's shape, and with the insertion of the bullet's lead core, but I don't know the actual processes used in bullet manufacturing.

I also told her it was my opinion that since the hollowpoint jacket (having a closed copper base due to the way it's constructed) allows none of the bullet's lead base to melt away during the intense heat of firing, it is going to retain its mass, and therefore its consistency of mass from shot to shot, better than the open base of a standard full metal jacket bullet.  I've also read that the open-base FMJ can allow the jacket to partially separate from the core at the base under the pressure of firing.  If so, that would certainly alter its flight slightly and at random.

She explained that it was her understanding that hollowpoints were used to cause more trauma inside the target, and I told her that she was correct.  She was having a hard time understanding that there is no direct correlation between the objectives behind hollowpoint "match" bullet designs, and the hollowpoint bullets designed to expand and cause more damage.  This was getting too technical for a layperson, but her interest was piqued by the story she was reading.  I had to explain that hollowpoints designed specifically for expansion on impact have a wide range of designs, operating velocities and applications, and that match hollowpoints have nothing to do with any of that.  The match bullets are only designed for accuracy, with no regard to their effects on a target.

That being the case, one can nonetheless do a little experimentation.  Manufacturers of match rifle bullets usually make a point of telling the customer that they are NOT intended, and should not be used for, hunting.  There is one company, Burger Bullets, that touts their match VLD (Very Low Drag) hollowpoints as hunting bullets.  I've been loading Berger 7 mm bullets in 280 Remington for my son's use at Boomershoot, and since he keeps his rifle zeroed for that load, he has also used the VLDs for hunting.  This particular bullet has a light (read weak) jacket, and while it is an awesome animal stopper, it explodes at high velocity inside the animal due to its light construction and causes major damage to any meat it comes near.  It also tears a large hole in the hide for those of us who keep the skins.  They make a tiny entry wound and a softball-sized exit wound.  That would be OK if the shot placement and angle were ideal because only the heart/lung cavity would be so effected (then too, we like to eat the heart if it's intact).  Other match hollowpoints have heavier jackets that don't behave much different, on impact, from a standard FMJ bullet.

Practicing for Boomershoot last week, we found one of our 30 caliber match bullet jackets behind a 2' diameter rotten, wet log that it had penetrated.  Just the jacket, turned nearly inside-out, with no lead core.  The hollowpoint tip was almost perfectly intact, and so behaved radically different from a hollowpoint hunting or defense bullet.  The bullet had traveled 400 yards, entered and then yawed violently sideways inside the log.  The intense pressure of deceleration caused the heavier lead core to burst out the side of the jacket, separating completely.  The open-sided jacket followed through to drop on the ground just behind the log.  These match bullets were loaded in .308 Winchester cartridges made by Black Hills Ammunition.  We were using 168 and 175 grain, "red box" new loads.  I think the bullets they use in these loads are from Sierra, but don't quote me on that.  You can call them and ask if you're curious.

This is an open letter to all the talk show hosts, pundits, party hacks, cheaters, scumbags, sick twisted freaks (you know who you are) and pro-freedom bloggers.  We could spend the rest of our lives cataloging the outrageous behavior of nasty, America-hating, ignorant, self-loathing, cultist, freedom-hating, anti-human, leftist politicians including Progressive Republicans.  We know they're bad, OK?  If there are three or four people who still don't get it, that's all right.

I'd rather try to figure out how we're going to get some principled Americans nominated so we're not always forced to choose between bad and worse-- between more socialism slower, and more socialism faster.  This last national election was a real puker.  The Republican Party is, at the moment, just as lost, dumbfounded, selfish and clueless as ever.  They're a herd of does, staring blankly into the headlights of an on-coming truck, and the worst part of it is; they don't even suspect that they're clueless.  They in the Republican leadership think they have some really clever answers, which amount to more of what got us into this mess.  I recently heard it described as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That fits very well.  The Republicans have some really super great, super ultra smart ideas for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  No really, listen...  (all the while we have this simple, proven model for success, and it's being ignored.)

We need to change that.  You need to change it.  I need to change it.  There isn't anyone else.  I suppose, since it's up to us, it will have to be on the local level for most of us, being as we're not billionaires.  That's OK.  We can still do what we can do.  A lot of people are jazzed up right now.  They just need somewhere to start.  Well, pick a place, a local issue or a local politician that needs a hand (or a very public spanking) and get to it!

That there are clueless people is not the issue.  There will always be the clueless.  They'll sit on the sidelines, worrying about who likes them and who doesn't, trying to figure out where the "center" is so they can position themselves in it and claim superiority for having done so, while someone else does the lifting.  Are you a sitter or a lifter?

I have a bad feeling that things could come to blows before this government is brought under control, and I really don't want that to happen.  Do you?  This country is far too important in the grand scheme of things.

And with that; I don't have much more to say on here, other than to repeat myself or talk about the weather and what I did last weekend, unless it's to tell you what I'm doing on the local level to influence politics.  Now I think I have some calls to make.

(Note that I placed this in nearly every one of Joe's categories. It's relevant to everything we do and every opportunity we want for our kids in the future)

The last few times I drove north to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho I noticed a sign on hwy 95 touting a shooting range.  This last time I noted the name and the location; Moses Mtn Shooting Range near mile post 391, just outside of Plummer.  Can't find anything on the interwebs so I'll just have to drive up there to check it out.

We sure need more shooting ranges around here.  A nice big, 500 or 1,000 yard rifle range would be sweet.

I won't be attending the Second Amendment Blog Bash and NRA convention next month. I just sent my regrets to the organizer.

Xenia's getting married in June and there are a lot of other things that are sucking up time and money this year so I just can't make it happen.

Last year I had a wonderful time (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples). Nearly every time my wife or kids talked to me on the phone they commented on "how happy you sound". I think Barb got a little jealous that I sounded happier to be with other bloggers than be with her. Yeah, I had a really, really great time.

Maybe next year. For this year the Boomershoot Gun Blogger Day next Thursday, with 11 gun bloggers attending, is going to have to be my main fix for the year. Even the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in September is out.

I have never been taken with the idea of selling a gun. When you possess a firearm, you possess something of importance. If you trade it for cash, you have lost it - and the cash in your hand will soon be gone. Sell something else! 
   
Jeff Cooper
Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
June 11, 1993
[I posted this once before but it likely wasn't noticed much in the collection of 146 other Cooper quote.

I'm selling a gun today. Other than a few guns I bought with the specific intent to resell this is the first time ever. It's not because I want the money, it's because the other person wants it and I don't really have a use for it. I haven't shot this one in years and I have another gun that fills this niche better than the one I am selling that I do shoot sometimes. Still, it makes me sad.--Joe]

Athough I harvested one deer with Barb's Jeep and another with my .300 Win Mag I don't really consider myself a hunter. But I do generally support hunters being able to continue their sport and harvesting food in this manner.

However--there are some hunters that give me pause. I may have to reevaulate my position on fox hunters.

Via email from Bruce L.:

Dear Concerned Citizen:

Please help ban fox hunting --- THIS MADNESS MUST STOP!!

Signed,
Peter Cottontail

From a long time Boomershooter who will be attending again:

Barrett M82A1, Pelican case, manual
Nightforce NXS 5.5-22 x 56mm scope, illuminated mil-dot reticle, quick detach bases, manual 3 magazines, cleaning kit
500 rounds linked API/APIT (4-1 mix, in 100-round cans)
500 rounds linked ball (4-1 ball / tracer, in 100 round cans)
240 rounds linked AP (4-1 AP/ AP tracer mix, old black-tip stuff, four belts in wooden crate)
70+ rounds HSM moly-coat
Assorted used mil-surp 50 BMG brass
Ammo only for sale if M82A1 sells, but available for sale separately if gun does sell.

$15k for rifle & scope, $13k for just the rifle (I really like the scope), slightly negotiable.

Ammo at $4 round mil-surp, $350/100, $320/100 for the AP, $5/round for the HSM, reasonable bulk discounts considered, especially for purchaser of rifle. It will be available for delivery at Boomershoot w/o further hassles (except maybe the chief financial officer of the household), or otherwise with appropriate negotiation.

All state and federal laws apply, but I’m not a FFL. Cash or precious metals only, paperwork optional.

If you won't be attending Boomershoot this year but are someplace in Washington or North Central Idaho I can probably arrange for the transportation to a suitable transfer location. Send me an email if interested: Joe AT JoeHuffman DOT Org.

Yesterday Barb had lunch with me at one of the Microsoft cafeterias. As we were getting her a visitors badge I noticed the beer and snacks in the lobby that were stacked more than half way to the ceiling. "Oh", I said, "It's party time." The receptionist said, "Yes, but it's not until 4:30 and I don't know who it's for and I know people are going to ask." I told it was for our group. I had received the "meeting notice" a day or so before that. But I don't care for beer, am not a big socializer, and I had some unit tests and code I wanted to finish up before I take time off for Boomershoot so I didn't attend.

What is interesting to me is that nearly every other company I have worked for had strict policies against having alcoholic beverages at work. And at Microsoft they bring it to you--frequently. I think it averages about twice a month they bring in free beer and I could literally drink on company time at company expense. I usually grab a snack and chat with people a little bit but don't drink.

With this in mind I wasn't surprised with the opening of a new "food court" next to the west coasts largest parking garage being built just outside my office window they were going to have a pub. Sure, whatever. It doesn't make any difference to me.

Now (via Ry) I find out they are canceling the lease for the pub. Hmmm... I probably would have never used it but I don't care for the apparent change in culture.

I sometimes have had fantasies of Microsoft becoming more tolerant instead of less tolerant. In particular I would like to be able to carry concealed. And having an on campus shooting range would be really cool. They have lots of soccer fields, volleyball courts, and numerous other recreational areas available. Why not a shooting range? There is a large Gun Club at Microsoft. In fact I know just the place for such a range.

I visited the new parking garage recently. Here are some pictures:

As you can see there is lots of empty space in this underground garage. And with the aid of my trusty laser range finder I found places where it was 345 yards from wall to wall. It's not really practice for Boomershoot (minimum range is 375 yards) but it's close. And it's would be better than anything else within 20 miles or so.

I was discussing this with some Microsoft friends at lunch the other day and they had a concern about the ceiling height. As the range gets longer the midrange height of the bullet gets larger too. Would people start hitting the ceiling beams? In particular Jim was concerned about using a 45-70 which has a trajectory resembling artillery.

It's a valid concern. With a 340 yard zero a typical .45-70 cartridge is going to have a midrange height of over 50 inches. My AR-15 shooting it's favorite ammo is going to have only a 7.1 inch midrange height. And my .300 Win Mag would have only have a midrange height of 6.3 inches.

I checked out the clearance in the garage and found that with a bench 30 inches above the floor there would be some beams the 45-70 bullets would connect with on their way to a 340 yard target.

So, I have to conclude it's not going to happen in the new Microsoft parking garage.

At least with 45-70 toys.

[Alternate title: Freeing my inner geek]

Over at Kevin's place in the comments to this post Ben was wondering if he should choose a bullet with a better Ballistic Coefficient (BC) for Boomershoot. The primary reason for making that sort of decision would be because, in most cases, it would be more tolerant of cross winds. But BC isn't the only factor to consider. Accuracy and muzzle velocity are obvious considerations as well.

What isn't so obvious and is difficult to calculate is at what point and under what conditions do you make the choice for one cartridge or another if the low wind tolerant bullet is more accurate than the high wind tolerant bullet? For example, imagine you have two guns to choose from. One is a .223 shooting bullets that, given no wind conditions, you can shoot with 0.5 MOA accuracy. The other is a .300 Win Mag that you can shoot with 0.75 MOA accuracy.

Obviously for any reasonable load in either gun the .300 Win Mag is going to have less wind drift than the .223. But it's not as accurate. So when do the wind errors add up to enough difference to make the .300 Win Mag the more likely gun to get a bullet on target? It depends on the range of the target, the altitude, the temperature, and how accurately you can estimate the wind. If your wind estimation skills are perfect it doesn't matter. But if you are perfect wouldn't be reading this blog post because you already know all the answers.

You can measure everything will good enough accuracy except the wind. But you know that you are probably within say +/- 2 MPH of the true wind speed. So now what? Which gun should you use?

It turns out I worked out the answer several years ago. The expression is not simple, but the calculation is much easier than testing at the range:

In the general case an expression for discovering wind estimation error V_w (in MPH) beyond which, at a given range (R), a less accurate but lower wind drift cartridge is the better choice.  This equation is:

V_w = 1/7563 x SQRT(( E_r2² - E_r1²)/(1/(MV₁ x (F0₁/R - 1.5))² - 1/(MV₂ x (F0₂/R - 1.5))²))

Where for each of the rifles under ideal Boomershoot conditions (3000 feet, 70F):

BC_c = 1.15 x BC
F0 = 166 x BC_c x SQRT(MV)
E_r = Error of the rifle in MOA.
MV = Muzzle velocity in fps.

So get out your calculators and start crunching those numbers!

Or you could just download the spreadsheet I made. But that would be cheating and you wouldn't feel good about yourself for at least a week.

Unless you are in an usual occupation (combat military, high risk police, illegal drug dealer) the odds are generally pretty low to have someone shooting at you. It's just certain occupations that are at serious risk of getting shot at.

What never occurred to me was that U.S. presidents get shot at a lot. Sure, I know, the Secret Service aren't there just to keep the groupies away. But what are the actual odds of someone trying to shoot a U.S. president?

They are better than I realized:

1. Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed on April 14, 1865.
2. James A. Garfield was shot and killed on July 2, 1881.
3. William McKinley was shot and killed on Sept. 6, 1901.
4. John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov 22, 1963.
5. Ronald Reagan was shot and severely wounded on March 31, 1981.
6. Andrew Jackson was shot at in the Capitol building on January 30, 1835, but avoided injury.
7. Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 while campaigning for president.
8. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was shot at on February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, just three weeks before his inauguration.
9. Assassins attempted to shoot and kill Harry Truman on November 1, 1950 but were stopped in a gunfight outside the Blair House.
10. Not one, but two, disturbed individuals attempted to shoot and kill Gerald Ford during his brief time as president.

That's four dead and 10 attempts. Since there have been 44 Presidents the odds are 4/44 or 9% of being shot and killed and 10/44 or 23% chance of being shot at. Of course that assumes the odds are constant through all time--which is a very poor assumption. But still it makes me think that's got to be one of the riskiest jobs we have in this country. Taken as a whole, as opposed to just those in the "boots on the ground" infantry, I'll bet being in the U.S. military today is a safer job.

Caleb says he would sell off body parts to acquire the Browning 1917 I posted about the other day.

It turns out he probably could just sell a kidney and keep the lung and piece of his liver and still have some change left over after purchasing it. I inquired as to the price and got this reply:

$6000 and it comes with a ton of extras: This is a Colt 1928 variation with safety; flash hider only 635 built and in this variation the right side plate was build with a much stronger design. We had the weapon changed to 8mm due to cheaper and more readily available. Only a few were built in semi auto we’ve seen them go for between $6000-$8000 without as many extras. Pictures are available upon request.

Tripod is a colt the 1928 version with Colt brass logo on rear leg. (These sell for $1000-$1200)

(7) 250 round cloth belts

Condenser hose and condenser can

(2) Oak 250 rds ammo boxes

1918 Browning loader w/ 8mm conversion with transit box. (these sell for $1000)

Custom 2 piece Mahogany transit chest on a removable roller base. One box holds weapon and the other all other parts

Two manuals

3000 rds of 8 MM

I received an email from a Boomershooter saying the 1917 Browning (here, the bottom picture in this post and picture 12 here) he had at Boomershoot 2008 "is up for sale at Cabelas gun library here in Post Falls. Boy it’s a magnet to pull people in!"

Post Falls is in north Idaho near Spokane Washington in case you are interested.

Update: Due to popular request I inquired about the price and got this reply.

I took my daughter to her middle school (6th, 7th & 8th grade) science fair last night.  She did an experiment to determine whether dog saliva has more or fewer germs than human saliva.  You guessed it-- humans' mouths carry more germs.

There were the usual baking soda volcanoes, rotting food experiments, egg-in-the-bottle demonstrations and such.  I also counted four terminal ballistics demonstrations.  Kids took several calibers out to the field and tested them on bricks, cinder blocks, fir timbers, drywall, phonebooks, and one even used a pistol-rated Kevlar vest.  All had the results anyone familiar with guns would expect-- common centerfire rifle rounds pretty much overwhelm any of these targets, while some pistol rounds can be stopped by some of them.

One kid had assumed that a .30-30 would penetrate a hard target better than a .25-06, simply because of the bigger, heavier bullet.  He of course found out otherwise.

While there were no firearms brought into the school, there were several spend bullets, targets showing depth of penetration, and several cartridges were displayed including .50 BMG tracer and a training (inert) round for a 3-inch naval (ship's) gun.

Nice work, kids!

Sorry-- no pictures (has anyone seen a rather nice, new pocket Olympus camera lying on the ground between Moscow, ID and Garfield, WA?).

This Saturday, the 14th, my son's school trap shooting team hosted a trap meet.  Hosting means we show up at 07:30 instead of 09:00.  We shoveled snow while others set up the kitchen and got the coffee started, loaded the traps with targets, etc.  It also means we stay after to clean and pack things up.

Below; Our next door neighbor, Laura, busts a target.  She hadn't fired a shotgun in her life until just this winter when I helped out by hand-throwing targets for her.  Saturday she held her own quite well.  You can tell she's using a 20 gauge automatic, can't you?

Below; Your average Eastern Washington high school kids in their natural setting.

Below; Alex pops one off.  He hit 28 of 50 this time out.

Below; Robert Cray wrote a song about this. (I know those buildings look pretty close for being downrange of a shooting club.  It's the camera lens-- I'm ~30 yards behind the shooter using a long lens.  Those buildings are over 350 yards away.  The 7 1/2 shot pellets are gently raining down at that distance.

Below; One of the school vehicles in the parking lot.  Reach for the stars-- learn to shoot well.

This was the first time I'd watched an "Annie Oakley".  It looks really fun.  All the participants line up side-by-side at the farthest "handicap" line (farthest from the trap house from which the targets are launched).  They worked in groups of three.  The first shooter on the left calls for a target.  "Pull!"  If that shooter makes a hit, the next shooter to the right calls for a target.  If the one who called, "Pull!" misses, the shooter to the right takes a shot.  If that one is a hit, the primary shooter (the caller) is eliminated from the game.  If the second shooter misses, a third shooter takes a shot.  If that shot is a hit, the first two shooters are eliminated. If one shooter makes a hit, but the next shooter in that group of three fires anyway, that shooter, and anyone in that group who fired and missed, is eliminated.  This goes on, in groups of three, with each shooter on the line taking a chance on being the first of three, over and over until there's one shooter left, who of course wins the game.  I understand there is big money in some of these games, but this being a school event I think the big prize was ten dollars-- almost enough to cover half the day's ammo cost for the winner.

I'd read some of her work in the past and been impressed. Brigid's home on the range - guns and gourmet cooking from a small homestead in the Midwest.  Oleg Volk posted a link to her site recently.  Most of what she writes comes out like poetry.  This was very good;

I am not a tree hugger. Not for me the granola fueled protests to save the spotted owl. Growing up in the mountains of the wilderness, I appreciate a tree in the form of a pile of two by fours as well as in it's original state. I do not think the trees are the home of sentient druid spirits, nor do the trees speak to me; but I am pleased to take shelter under or in their branches, reinforced in the smallness of my form next to their trunks, smiling as the branches separate me from the chatter of the world that echoes outside the woods. There, branches are what conceal me as I wait for my prey, like any animal, participating in the cycle of the food chain. I am an omnivore and those less equipped than I, forget that at their peril. It is the bringing home of sustenance. Bringing home, not a trophy so much as a sign of provision, that those that work and strive will be rewarded with a full belly and warmth.

It's a nice change from reading about the downfall of our Republic.  She's a prolific writer too, so you're in good shape if you need a lot of distraction.

Kris tells me he is going to attend Boomershoot as a spectator and wondered if this would be an appropriate lead pusher for the event:

The original design intent is described as:

Designed as an equalizer for inconceivable and unpredictable lane changes, and other traffic related anomalies perpetrated by the cell phone using, motor home/SUV driving morons in Florida imposed on the rest of us. The below pictured machine was designed for that purpose.

Each mini gun fires at a rate of 3000 rounds per minute (6000 total). During initial test and evaluation it was demonstrated that a single 2 second burst would, and did blow a 40 foot RV with tow car clean off the road, leaving an open and unobstructed route ahead. It will vaporize an SUV in seconds! Tests further indicated that after two or three RV's/SUV's in a row were eliminated, or "friggin smoked", others voluntarily pulled off the road and thus became a "non threat."

I told him it would be welcome but the accuracy of the lead on target was far more important than the quantity.

But perhaps we can create a special Boomershoot event for this class of toy if there is enough interest out there. See also these variants.

I went to a steel match today and shot with both my .40 STI and the Gun Blog .45 by Para. I'd been practicing with the .45 a lot more than the .40 because I wanted to learn how to shoot it reliable. I did pretty well with only a couple times getting the grip slightly wrong and not getting the grip safety fully disengaged. What was a little disturbing however was that I did better with the .45, which has a double action trigger, and a sight radius a full inch shorter than my .40.

There is another variable however. I always shot the stage with my .40 before the .45. So I had the advantage of practice on that particular stage before shooting with the .45.

<shrug>

I don't know if it means anything or not. More tests are needed. But here are the results for your examination:

Son-in-law Caleb was handicapped by using my old Ruger P-89 which hadn't been cleaned, lubricated or fired in several years. It jammed on nearly every string of fire and many times more than once in a single string. I showed him how to clean it when we got home, gave him a key to the range, a 1000 rounds of ammo, and told him to do some further testing.

This time of year (66 days until Boomershoot) not just me but participants start putting the finishing touches on their plans for the big event. Here we see the results of Bruce Da Squirrel Hunter Boomershoot project:

Here is part of the story from Bruce himself:

Well I finally finished my year long project of building a completely new Polished Stainless Steel Tripod. This couldn't have happened without the wonderful help of .223 Bill Lester and Fred Forgone working with me hand and foot to get this project completed on time for April 30th and Boomershoot once again this year. I think Fred has more gray hairs this year with me bugging him non-stop for his assistance with so many miscellaneous parts and devices even on his days off.

My hat is off to .223 Bill and Fred for sticking with me and letting me drive both of them nuts for a year while we invented and built what I believe is the best shooting platform ever invented. This Stainless Tripod was .223 Bill's first production unit since his personal prototype which was made from mild steel. A true craftsman and dedicated friend.

This years project was invented after last years highly modified hunting tripod which had a 55 pound railroad track hanging from the center of the pod which made the total tripod with rifle weigh in at approx. 130 pounds.

After great success with that unit, I was still unhappy about having to hold and adjust the rear of the rifle for every shot. My heartbeat was moving the crosshairs too much in the excitement of Boomershoot.

So back to the drawing board and the current project for this past year has been: "How do we build a better mouse trap"?

Well, you start with the best pair of talented craftsmen who can invent right along with you and build dream toys with a common goal of hitting 7 inch targets all the way out to 650 yards and 700 yards.

The attached photos show my first dress rehearsal of the unit in my living room as my garage isn't big enough with two cars in it to allow me to set this monster up in. The rifle is a Remington 700 Long Action and a Hart Custom .25-06 fluted barrel. The rifle is the only item carried over from last year.

The new tripod has an aluminum front Anti-Cant device and the rear has a polished mild steel Micro Elevation / Traversing Device. Along with these two items is a Mono-rail Anti-lift device up front that I also invented, a modified design instead of the two rail system I employed last year.

Hopefully the recoil will be less then last year with the overall increased weight (150lbs) and the much larger footprint of this unit. I had the .25-06 recoil down to that of a .22 long rifle last year. If this unit does what I think it will, there won't be any recoil this year.

This new tripod still needs to be field tested, but I have a feeling that this will be one sweet tripod to shoot from.

I can't wait for Boomershoot and the chance to really put all this work to the test.

Thank you once again Fred and Bill for all you did and sacrificed for me.

We might just once again hear the call of the wild "ReAdjust"

From the comments here:

An old Italian Mafia Don is dying and he calls his grandson to his bed.

"You lissin-a me. I wanna for you to taka my chrome plated 38 revolver so you will always remember me."

"But grandpa, I really don't like guns. Howzabout you leava me your Rolex watch instead."

"Shuddup an lissin. Somma day you gonna runna da business, you gonna have a beautifula wife, lotsa money, a biga home and maybe a couple a bambinos.

Somma day you gonna coma home and maybe find you wife inna bed with another man. Whadda you gonna do then......pointa to you watch and a say, Times Up?"

I love the name they gave it--Sporting Rifle. Surely that must mean it is for "sporting purposes" and it can't possibly be an "assault weapon".

And did you notice the logo on the side of the receiver? STI!

I shoot a STI gun in competition, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

Never mind the 1600+ yard (that is 0.91 miles) hit on a 12" diameter plate, the guy in the video (you get to see him toward the end) is someone I know. He has been to Boomershoot several times and Barb and I went to high school with his Aunt Shirley. He also used to shoot a lot of IPSC at the same events I went to.

Oh, he is also a gunsmith. I suspect he made the video to show off some of his work as well as his talent.

Thanks to Boomershooter Michael who had the following to say about the video:

Spring is coming, and a not-so-young man's thoughts turn to . . . Boomershoot.

Well, close enough for now.

As planned Caleb and I did some more tests with Ry's test target. Video and commentary by Caleb.

We went to the Boomershoot site expecting to find little or no snow. We should have called ahead. There was about two feet of snow and we were unable to make it to the Taj Mahal with all our gear. We made do at the first berm. We used a paper target to zero the gun for this range (25 yards) then took a single shot with each caliber at the stack of steel plates at the base of the stump. The bullets at the steel plate went over the chronograph.

This was our setup.

In the following video you see the result of SS-109 and 30.06 blacktip ammo shot at the stack of steel plates each 0.25 inches thick. There is a gap of about 0.75 inches between each plate. Estimated velocity of the .223 bullet at the target is 2600 fps. Estimated velocity of the 30.06 bullet at the target is 2360 fps.

The .223 went through one and almost penetrated the second plate. The 30.06 went through three plates and partially into the fourth.

The .300 Win Mag pushing hand-loaded 162 grain military surplus black tip bullets was able to hit the target with a velocity of about 3315 fps. It went through all six plates:

Update: See also this paper on AP ammo. It's just the first page (you have to pay for the rest of it) but it's interesting reading.

I love reactive targets and I use them so much I am a little jaded. But even though these targets aren't as reactive as the ones I make I still enjoyed the video.

And contrary to some indicators just because there is a woman pulling the trigger some of the time doesn't mean I'm annoyed with the video. I find this is an appropriate use of women and guns in our fight to keep and bear arms.

My son Alex is part of a high school school trap shooting team.  They had a match this morning near Rosalia, Washington, which was attented by several high school teams from around the region.  Trap is quite popular in Eastern WA, as this is one of the best places in the country for pheasant and quail hunting, to say nothing of the excellent duck and goose hunting opportunities.  From the shooting lines today, we saw several hundred geese in the air.

Above; No, it isn't a crime scene or a network news story.  It depicts a fun event in which kids use guns and sharpen their skills on aerial targets, and so, by definition, it isn't "news".  The parking lot was packed with similar vehicles, open, loaded with guns and ammo.  Most people don't bother to lock their vehicles, me included.

Above; an appropriately named school district.

Above; Alex in full target-busting mode.  That's a decent hit-- lots of small fragments.  If you hit one full-on, it disappears in a cloud of dust.  Scoring is the same either way.  If you break a little piece off the target, it's a hit, same as a "duster".

A great time was had by all.  Everyone was super nice.  There were decent facilities for those who wanted to stay warm and there was free coffee and decent food at very reasonable prices.  This locally operated club range was equipped with four trap houses, meaning 20 kids can be on the shooting line at one time.

I'd guess there were about 80 shooters attending and about 150 to 200 people there in total-- Guns and ammo lying about everywhere, much like you'd find skis and poles sitting out on stands in front of a ski lodge.  Now if we were to take anything the anti gun-rights loons say with a shred of seriousness, we'd assume that all these kids would end up turning on each other in a bloddy shootout, as the stresses of competition became too much for them to handle, or something.  In fact, everyone was relaxed and friendly.  I will point out that, unlike a typical football game, there are no paramedics on standby at these events.  There would be no point in it.

Alex broke 26 of 50 targets, which isn't bad, but a really good shooter would have hit 50 of 50.  Today there was some gusting wind, so even a really good shooter might have missed one or two because the targets were jumping around a bit in the wind.  If you've ever thrown a Frisbee in the wind you what know what I mean.  These clay targets fly a lot like little Frisbees.

I believe I have an answer to Joe's "Just one Question".

As Joe states;

There are three possible answers to this question.

1. "I don't know." In which case my response is, "Come back to the debate when you can answer 'Yes' or 'No'."
2. "No." In which case my response is, "Then you should be advocating the repeal of ALL gun control laws and I don't want to hear a single anti-freedom word from you on this topic again."
3. "Yes and here is my demonstration."

My answer is; "Yes and here is my demonstration."

In response to Clinton era attacks on gun rights, I and many other Americans decided to buy our first guns, or to get back into shooting after a long hiatus.  Gun dealers often credited Clinton (and his administration) for being "salesman of the year" for several years running.  The atmosphere at gun shows was very energetic, and the NRA's membership got a large bump as people got guns and got involved in pro second amendment activism.  The NRA and other groups also started pushing harder for gun handling safety as it became clear that our right to keep and bear arms was seriously threatened.  This all falls under what we'll call "backlash".

The backlash against actual gun restriction resulted in more gun owners, more participation in shooting activities, more participation in pro 2A activism, more emphasis on safety and sefl defense, and many more states passing "shall issue" concealed carry laws.

More armed citizens, more of them carrying concealed, and more emphasis on safety and home security, and presto-- violent crime has been going down in the areas where gun ownership has increased, and gun accidents have been on the decline for years, even with the increased gun ownership.

Hence, I submit that, due to public backlash, the average person has indeed been made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons.

The twist lies in the fact that guns weren't simply banned except in a few small pockets in the U.S..  The question pertains to "restrictions" and not to full prohibition.  In those places where all guns were effectively outlawed, crime continued to rampage, but in places where we could still legally get and keep guns we became safer.  Semi-auto rifles and carbines (the so-called "assault weapons") were purchased in the largest numbers too, because those were the ones most threatened (my first gun purchase ever was a Glock 20 with a 15 round magazine, because I knew the magazine restriction was coming.  I then bought several more 15 round magazines "while I still could").  I maintain that the very large increase in interest in AR-15s and AKs, et al ("Evil Black Rifles" or EBRs) is in part due to the Clinton era restrictions.

Today, the Clinton era concerns are back.  The Obama groupies are wanting to pass more gun restrictions, and as a result, people are buying up guns, "while we still can".  Most pointedly, they're buying up semi-auto rifles and carbines, semi-auto pistols, full capacity magazines and folding or collapsible stocks, as those are all in the most threatened category.  We can only hope for more change in the form of backlash.  Do your part to make America even safer; encourage your friends and neighbors to get their first guns, join the NRA, and become active "while they still can".

Details of the test, with pictures, are here. Ry stopped by the house yesterday and I got to handle the test target and we talked and speculated about the details of the test results. The next time I go back to Idaho I think I will borrow his target and do the same test with 30-06 AP.

Yesterday Barb and I went on drive. This Thursday Barb has a class in Bellingham so we drove up there ahead of time to make sure she can find it without difficulty during morning traffic. It was a nice day and it was a pleasant drive and we got a chance to talk about a bunch of stuff rather than sitting at our respective desks with our hobbies.

Just prior to leaving we stopped at Joe's Sports, Outdoor, and More (no relation). I was looking for some .45 ACP brass so I can reload for my Gun Blog 45. Midway is out of stock. The shelf with the brass was nearly empty with only a couple bags with some 7mm brass hanging from a hook. The powder and primer shelves were nearly empty as well. Hmmm...

On the way back from Bellingham we stopped at Kesselring Gun Shop in Burlington. The parking lot was FULL. And this is on the same weekend that WAC had their big show in Puyallup! I found a narrow spot to park between a building and a pickup that was parked such that it was blocking a private road. We went inside to find the store was packed. Every aisle was crowded. There was just barely enough room to move between all the people. I found the brass I was looking for at a reasonable price (considering), paid for it and we left.

One has to wonder if we had put that much money and effort into defeating Obama in November would we have succeeded? Being reactive seldom is better than proactive but that just isn't the way human nature works. And the money gun owners are spending on firearms, ammo, and accessories could have gone into the election process and ended up in the hands of mainstream media who are one of our worst enemies and instead of into tools of freedom in our own hands.

I received an email from Para USA a few minutes ago. They are preparing for SHOT Show and will be distributing a new catalog at the show. The page 34 of the catalog looks like this:

You can download the 2009 Para USA catalog off their website at this link http://www.para-usa.com/new/product_catalog.php.

You might have noticed the video link on the image to a web page and video of the gun blogger event. Yeah, it doesn't work for me either.

I added another feature to Modern Ballistics for the Field. It now gives you the approximate maximum range for your bullet under the given environmental conditions.

Today (Sunday) was a beautiful sunny day, and with the drifted snow glistening like it was covered with diamonds, it was far too beautiful to stay inside.  I took Alex to the Peterson Range near Moscow, Idaho for some fresh air.

The driveway up to the shooting bays was blocked with a large snow berm.  We could have spent some time with a shovel to clear the berm, but even then I'd need chains on all fours to have any chance of driving in.  Too much bother.  Much easier to don the snowshoes and walk in.

Now this is a nice exercise in itself.  If you have your rig right there at the shooting bay, it means you can lay everything out-- your shooting bag, all your ammo, gun cases, everything, even working right off your tailgate.  When you're hiking in, you bring what you can carry.  In this case it meant leaving the range bag, most of the ammo and some of the gun cases behind.  Not a problem.  I had my .45 in in my pocket and a CZ-52 pistol in a flap holster with two mags, plus a three-mag AR pouch on by belt.  One 20 rounder in the AR and another 30 round magazine that fit in my breast pocket.  Four 15 round mags for the M1 Carbine on one belt, plus a 50 round box of Carbine ammo in another coat pocket.  With water bottles (you lose a lot of water just breathing in these conditions, so always bring water) targets and a stapler, wearing our eyes and ears, we were off for a nice afternoon of leisurely hiking and shooting in the sunshine.

Strangely, we were the only ones at the range today.

The weather could not have been better.  At around 20 degrees F, the snow doesn't melt too much on your clothing and you stay nice and dry.  Plus when you're hoofing around the range with a load, on snowshoes, you don't overheat, and it's not so cold that your lungs are stressed.  Perfect.

Here we're testing out the steel pistol targets.  No problem, except that some trespasser had gone in and shot holes in the steel with a centerfire rifle (all members know never to do anything so stupid and inconsiderate);

Since everything around us is covered in anywhere from several inches to several feet of snow, loading the mags required a little different technique.  Holding the ammo box and the magazine in one hand, I'm stuffing the rounds in with the other.  Everything stays out of the snow.  For the rifles we brought enough pre-loaded magazines;

Here I'm sighting in the M1 Carbine.  This gun had failed on the last outing, due to a gas piston nut that had worked its way completely out of the gas block.  I am amazed that the thing never self-destructed.  Nice going on the design, W.W. II era guys!  The gas nut is supposed to be staked in place, but this more recently manufactured IAI carbine never had the nut staked.  It took many thousands of rounds of UltiMAK product testing before the gas nut finally worked its way out.  After that I had disassembled the rifle completely including a full takedown of the bolt, removed the optic and the optic mount, repaired the damaged gas nut threads and trued up the gas piston, then reinstalled the nut with Locktite (another accepted method) installed a new optic mount (to test a new lot) and reinstalled the Holosight.  After all that, the Carbine shot to POA with no adjustments at 20 yards, and then at 100.  I didn't see any need to change the settings on this old Holosight.  No malfunctions;

If you happen to own a .30 Carbine, let it be known that the exposed lead at the base of regular FMJ bullets does partially melt, it atomizes when liquefied and it finds its way into the gas block, depositing in there, slowly reducing the volume inside the gas chamber and eventually preventing the piston from traveling all the way forward.  It forms a very hard dross that is a royal bitch to clean out.  That's one reason why I want to try the Speer hollowpoints-- they have a full copper base.  You may find similar deposits inside the AR-15 bolt carrier, back behind the bolt, which is why you need to clean it thoroughly.

Alex and I each got photos of each other with brass in the air (here's the trick; press the shutter button part way own, into the "here's the exact exposure I want" setting. The instant you hear the report, press the shutter button all the way-- you get instantaneous shots that way.  Works nearly every time);

We had a brass catcher on the AR (a good idea when shooting in the snow) but no one seems to make one for the Carbine.  The brass comes out hot and melts the snow when it hits, so when you pick up the cases they're encrusted in ice.  Yes, a brass catcher would be much better out here today. I wanted to bring home every .30 Carbine case because I'm going to load up a batch of hollowpoints for function testing.

All in all it was a great time.

I've fixed all the fixable bugs in my cell phone/PDA web based exterior ballistics program I announced last November and put it at it's permanent home at http://field.modernballistics.com/.

Enjoy and let me know if you run across any bugs not mentioned on the Known Bugs page. Suggestions for improvements are also welcome. Send them to "JoeH AT modernballistics.com".

I have worked with the mathematics of exterior ballistics for so long that I sometimes forget the general nature of the path of a rifle bullet to it's target is not mind boggling obvious. I was reminded of this by an email I received today:

Need a answer: I was told that when shot a 30 cal. bullet goes up and makes an arc to the target, when held level. What happens, say at 100 yards.?

This email caused me to have a flashback to when I was in grade-school (yes Kris, firearms had been invented by the time I left grade-school).

When I was about the fourth grade a friend of mind, Verl (yeah, kids had strange names back in those days), insisted that the bullet would rise after it left the barrel of a rifle. I didn't believe it and asked how long it took before it when into orbit (or some such thing that pointed out the absurdity of his claim). He didn't know but asked his dad and came back to school and explained it went up for a while then came back down. My knowledge of and ability to articulate the physics of gravity and moving objects was limited and although I was profoundly unsatisfied with this explanation I couldn't refute his assertion that it was true.

Later I made sense of it and eventually I wrote a computer programs that accurately predicts the path of a bullet as it leaves the muzzle. I am now much more capable of articulating the physics and will now attempt do so.

If you were to go to the range and instead of shooting the bullet you were to drop it from your fingers you would correctly expect the bullet to immediately accelerate toward the center of earth and pick up speed at the rate of about 32 feet per second for each second it is in the air until it hit something. It doesn't rise for a while then start falling. If you take a carpenter's level to the range and line up the bore with the level such that the bore was horizontal and fire the gun the bullet will drop, relative to the horizontal, from the instant it leaves the barrel. It does not rise and then fall. It also does not fall at the same rate as a bullet you dropped from your fingers but that is another, much more complicated issue that is beyond the scope of this post.

Because the bullet immediately starts falling as it leaves the barrel in order for the sights to predict the impact point they are not aligned exactly parallel with the bore. They are aligned such that when you view the target they line up where the bullet will actually hit after bullet has dropped by whatever amount on it's travel to the target. If the bore is horizontal the sights are pointed slight down. If the sights are horizontal then the bore will be pointed slightly up. In other words there is an angle between the line of sight and the bore of the gun. I call this angle the "Sight Angle".

As far as I know I am the first to use the phrase "Sight Angle". I use this to simplify the setting of the scope for long distance shooting. Most long range shooting instructors refer to your gun having a "Zero" that depends on the altitude, temperature, bullet velocity, and ballistic coefficient of the bullet. This is wrong. The gun is constant with respect to the environment. The drop of the bullet changes, not the scope setting.

Knowing the distance to the target and the drop the bullet makes when it goes this distance we can compute the proper angle the barrel should be with the horizontal to hit a target that is the same distance above the ground as the muzzle of the barrel. This angle is the proper angle required to have the gun exactly compensate for the drop of the bullet on it's way to the target. This angle is not the sight angle because there is another complication--the height of the sight above (almost always but not necessarily) the bore. For a typical scoped rifle the line of sight through the scope is about 1.5 inches above the center of the bore. I call this the sight height. Using some trigonometry the sight height and proper angles can all be number crunched into a single number that you can dial into your scope such that for any give range and bullet drop you can dial your scope to the proper angle and you have precisely compensated for the drop of the bullet such that where you line the sights up that is where the bullet is going to go (minus bullet inaccuracy, wind drift, and shooter error). This "proper angle" is my Sight Angle. If you know what the environment is and you know the angle of the scope (and its height) relative to the bore you will know where the bullet will hit for any given range.

So, the email asked for what happens at 100 yards. Here are the graphs (generated with Modern Ballistics, which I wrote).

First the drop for a bullet fired with the bore of the gun horizontal. This is for a .308 Winchester shooting Federal match 168 grain bullets at "standard conditions" (59 F, sea level). Yes, I know this graph is confusing. It is not the path of the bullet. This is the distance the bullet has dropped as it traverses from the muzzle to the target. The drop increases the further it travels:

By the time the bullet has traveled 100 yards it has dropped nearly 3 inches. If you point the bore up at a slight angle (4.23 Minutes of Angle to be exact) compared to a scope mounted 1.5 inches above the center of the bore, aim the scope at a target 100 yards the bullet will start out 1.5 inches below the line of sight of the scope. Because the barrel is pointed up slightly as the bullet travels forward it will rise as it travels to the target. The distance from the line of sight through the scope to the bullet at any given range is called the height of the bullet at that range. Hence at the muzzle the height is -1.5 inches. And since the proper angle for a 100 yard zero was dialed into the scope the height at 100 yards will be 0.00 inches as seen in this graph:

So, from the viewpoint of the scope the bullet does rise and then fall. Of particular interest is that there are actually two zeros for this scope setting. There is a "Near Zero" at 49.8 yards and there is the normal or "Far Zero" at 100 yards. At what is called the Midrange, 75.1 yards in this case, the bullet is at its maximum height of 0.2 inches above the line of sight.

So that is the path of the bullet for a 100 yard shot.

It is just my opinion but I don't think shooting at 100 yards is very interesting with a rifle. The errors involved for temperature changes, air pressure, wind drift, and bullet velocity variations just don't stack up enough to amount to much at that kind of range. For a .30 caliber rifle I don't find things particularly interesting until we start shooting targets at 500 yards and beyond. I'm not going to get into all the interesting details because 99.9% of the people will find what I think is fascinating as mind bogglingly boring. But here is a hint of 500 yard shooting. A graph of the height of a bullet, again relative to the line of sight of the scope, for the same rifle and cartridge as above but for a 500 yard target:

Someone wants to know if a .50 caliber round can penetrate a Mercedes Guard Pullman:

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