The View From North Central Idaho

The HK, it's just so cute and happy.

Amanda Matlosz
May 7, 1998
Referring to the 9mm firearm made by HK.

Registration may frighten me into buying a gun. Since lists will get into criminal hands, those of us who are armed will become targets of gun thieves, while the unarmed among us will become sitting ducks for all thieves. On balance, I'd rather have a gun.

Diane Francis
June 5, 1995 issue of Maclean's

In the comments to my most recently posted “Quote of the day” it was pointed out to me (thank you Greg) that Claire Wolfe has modified her position on it being “too early to shoot the bastards”.  She, as of August 9, 2004, says,

I can no longer think of any moral reason not to "shoot the bastards."

Putting aside for a moment that I do not regard Ms. Wolfe as my “moral compass“, this change in position brings up some very interesting questions for people wishing to start hunting bastards:

1. What calibers are most effective and practical for hunting bastards?
2. Is there a special season for bow hunters?
3. Are there any restrictions on weights, genders, or ages?
4. How does one positively identify bastards?
5. Are nets, barbed hooks, traps and/or poisons allowed?
6. Are explosives allowed?  If so, are their restrictions on the size and type of explosives?  How about on the size, composition, and weight of shrapnel?
7. Is baiting allowed?
8. If baits are allowed are there any effective baits other than the obvious young women, money, and alcohol?
9. I realize clubbing baby seals is frowned upon, but what about clubbing bastards?
10. Are there any hunting guides that specialize in hunting bastards?
11. Can habitat destruction be utilized to reduce the number of bastards?
12. Where does one buy their hunting license for bastard shooting?
13. Are tags required?
14. What is the bag limit?
15. Are out of state hunters charged more for their license and tags?
16. Is there a particular season for shooting bastards?
17. Are there particular habitats where bastards flourish?
18. Are there restrictions on shooting them during certain parts of the day?
19. Is bastard meat safe for consumption by domestic animals?  Or must it be used for compost only?
20. Are the hunting zones broken down by precinct, county, congressional district, or state boundaries?
21. What hunting zones have the highest concentration of bastards?
22. Are there any bastard reserves where bastard hunting is prohibited?
23. May bastards be shot in their nests with their young?
24. Can bastards be made into trophies?
25. Are there taxidermists that specialize in bastards?
26. Are there any Boone and Crockett type scoring systems for determining if you have bagged a record setting bastard?
27. Does PETA or any other “animal rights” group protest the hunting of bastards?  Is there an season and/or bag limits for them?
28. What if bastard hunting becomes extremely popular and bastards become an endangered species?  Will there be conservation groups similar to Ducks Unlimited and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation?
29. Any idea who might want to be founding members of Bastards Unlimited?  Is there an season and/or bag limits for them?
30. Are there NRA hunter education classes available for hunting bastards?

You know... with all these questions I don't think I'm quite ready for bastard hunting yet.  I'll keep you posted though.  And it's not like I haven't given this some thought before.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

Claire Wolfe
From 101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution

As I have been saying, the Republicans in Washington State have an insufficient lack of ethics to win a close election.  Now it looks like we know how the Democrats did it.  From Sound Politics:

It was last reported that there were 3,539 more ballots counted in King County than voters who cast them. The discrepancy is actually much larger.

The 3,539 is only the net. This comes from having roughly 1,500 more voters than counted ballots in some precincts, and about 5,000 more ballots than known voters in other precincts.

For some reason I find this incredibly funny.  I'm not sure why.   Gregoire is very anti-gun, I work in the state and probably will be living in the state in a few years.  Her election is very bad news for me.  Yet I find myself laughing.  Very odd...

The only thing that I can think of to explain my mirth is this is further evidence of the death throes of the evil party.  They are so desperate to maintain power they are willing to resort to blatant cheating.  And their getting caught at cheating, even if they get away with it this time, will further their well deserved trip into political extinction.

That's the headline of a USA Today article.  There is a lot of hope along those lines from a number of high ranking politicians.  I think they believe that because they want to believe that.  I don't think there is empirical evidence or a logical basis to support the conclusion that this will have any more than a very short term benefit.

I think giving aid to those victims is the right thing to do but I'm nearly certain the net results is that we will still have just as many enemies in the Islamic world as before we gave aid.  Sure, we will get some “moderates” to be more friendly to us.  But those that believe we must convert or be killed, and are our real enemies, are driven by a mindset that no amount of aid will change.  Their mindset is driven by religious conviction.  How does giving them aid change that in the slightest?  They may be extremely grateful for our aid, but that doesn't change the fact that “god” has given them orders to convert or kill us.  The extremists among them will eat our food, drink our water, accept our medicine, then laugh at us for the folly of giving them the strength to kill us.

This is a war for the hearts and minds of an entire culture and I suspect the only way we can win this war is to destroy their culture as it presently exists.  Giving them aid doesn't help accomplish that task but we should do it anyway.

The goal of CSGV is the orderly elimination of the private sale of handguns and assault weapons in the United States. CSGV seeks to ban handguns and assault weapons from importation, manufacture, sale and transfer by the general American public, with reasonable exceptions made for police, military, security personnel, gun clubs where guns are secured on club premises, gun dealers trading in antique and collectable firearms kept and sold in inoperable condition. Hunting weapons, such as shotguns and rifles would be unaffected by these bans, because they do not pose a large threat to the American public the way handguns and assault weapons do.

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV)
1000 16th Street, N.W. Suite 603
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 530-0340
From: http://www.gunfree.org/csgv/csgvsumm.htm (as of 1/6/99--dead as of 1/4/2004)

As some of you might have guessed I watch the log file on boomershoot.org pretty close.  This afternoon saw a few hits coming in from a forum I had never heard of:

http://www.falfiles.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=129715

I went to check it out and found that someone is planning to attend Boomershoot 2005 but doesn't have the right rifle for it yet.  That deficiency is in the process of being remedied:

Okay, heres the deal. I have been invited to the Boomer Shoot in Idaho this April. The big problem is that I do not have a 30 cal. heavy barrel rifle. My brother has offered to loan me his for my turn at the shoot but that is not going to fly for me.
My research has told me that for new rifles Remington costs the most ($932)followed by in order of price:
Winchester - $734
Savage - $675
Charles Daily barreled action - $409 + about $80 for a stock

I have not been to the local GS looking for a nice used rifle. My goal here is to avoid paying for the rifle by selling one that I already have.
Anybody have any ideas or opinions?

This so cool!  All these people from all over the country (this guy lists his location as PRK, which I presume is California) are buying rifles specifically designed to hit small objects many hundreds of yards away and I gave them the incentive to do that.  And Ry has enticed 127 hits on Boomershoot.org from the forums on ar15.com so far this month (just four days).

I feel tingly all over and it's not just from the unhappiness I know it would cause the Senators from NY and CA if they knew what we are doing.  Molon Labe you jerks!

I was reading this article and it reminded me to go check out my earning from Google AdSense (on the left side of my blog).  Since I only get about 50 vists a day I didn't expect much and I was actually pleasantly surprised to find that on the average I have been earning $0.05/day with my blog.  Sometime today I expect I will break the $1.00 total earnings mark since I begain AdSense in the middle of December.  [sarcasm alert]I can't wait to tell Barb that I'm ready to quit my day job and just stay home, write on my blog, and go for walks and cuddle with her rather than drive 150 away to earn money and only come home on weekends.[end sarcasm]  And probably it's not anything that is going to change right away.  According the article:

Industry-wide, ad executives offered plenty of reasons for avoiding the blogosphere. "We're very interested in the medium and would love to explore it, but our clients are particularly cautious," explained John Montgomery, CEO of WPP Group's mOne North America. "Lifestyle blogs could work very well--fishing, or tennis, or something--but who's interested in that? The problem is that the blogs generating all the buzz are those that our clients think too risky to associate with."

And since in a large part I'm about guns and explosives I suspect I will not be a darling of the advertisers anytime soon.  Especially with Google since guns are against their policy.  And if the ratio holds ($0.001 per vist) even bloggers like Kim du Toit with about 10K visits per day will only get about $10.00/day in income.  I'm not sure, but that might actually pay for his bandwidth.  Neither of us are going to be quiting our day jobs anytime soon.

I put a webbug in my email about the kid in Austin wanting to build a pipe bomb.  I finally got a hit on it that traced back to the city of Austin:

162.89.0.60 - - [03/Jan/2005:21:31:09 +0000] "GET /austin.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 807 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

No formal response back yet.  But it was only 11 hours ago they read it too.  And of course I might never hear back from them.

I had someone at work today say I was too tough on the kid.  Maybe.  If he hadn't lied to me and especially if he hadn't said something about "taking down a small town" I would been more charitable.  And if he had just had his mom call me the police wouldn't have had to get involved.  I'd rather be safe than sorry and this kid was over the line in my book.

Oh, another hit on a webbug of interest... at [03/Jan/2005:16:20:08 +0000] the kid or someone at his IP address read my email (for at least the second time) about giving him another chance to have his mother call me.  For the entire email exchange, minus a few identifying details, see my web page Bomb Help 2004.

Update: At [04/Jan/2005:12:48:31 +0000] someone at Austin International Airport read my email.  I presume the Austin police forwarded it on to them.

As with some other things that are beyond what our ape-like evolution prepared us for, explosions are, at some level, very odd and curious things. Our brains are programmed to pay special attention to strange and unusual things -- 'magic' things. Explosions invoke that curiosity of magic in our brains. A gun with its 'action at a distance' capability is a magic tool. But at long distances there typically isn't the immediate confirmation that something really happened 'out there'. I change that. By creating a sort of Walt Disney-like world where 'magic' happens, I give the shooter an escape from reality. This is a Magic Kingdom for long range shooters. For one day I give them the keys to the Kingdom where they get to perform their own magic.

Joe Huffman
March 26, 2002
When asked, "Why does the average Boomershoot participant attend the shoot?"

Analog Kid at Random Nuclear Strike posts about  “Senor Mollbot” at What Hath I Wrought picking up his new rifle to be used at Boomershoot 2005.  They are shooting partners for the event and sent in their entry for the May 2005 event in late July of 2004--the very first entry I received.  I won't go into the details on all mishaps that happened with their check (some my fault, some Analog Kid's).  And also note there is a Boomershoot 2005 banner up over there.

Then Kirk over at Limpidity.org says his entry is “in the mail”, he has his hotel reserved, and is in the process of getting his airplane tickets.  There is also a Boomershoot banner and link up on his site for which I am very grateful.

I also would like to note that all three of these guys are buying/building new rifles for Boomershoot 2005.  It looks like my secret plan is working...

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority merely because the majority is the majority.  Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

Guido (Giordano) Bruno
(1548-burned at stake, 1600)

Last week I received entries from five people for Boomershoot 2005. Heather and Ed are coming down from Alaska again--following a great circle route that is a 2040 mile journey!  And in the last three days I got email representing at least another four people saying they were or had sent in their entries.  Just counting the actual entries in hand I'm running ahead of any other Boomershoot ever at this time of year.  It's a good thing we have added more shooting positions or we would be full by the end January or the first of February.  As it is my guess is that we will just have enough positions to accomodate people.

Speaking of travel distances to Boomershoot 2005.  Kim du Toit is planning on driving with Son&Heir the 1950 road miles (1400 great circle mile).  Stephanie Sailor came over 2100 great circle miles last year and I expect will be here again this year, although it's possible she will have moved somewhat closer by then.  And I believe one of the people that says he is coming lives in central Florida which is about 2250 great circle miles. I don't want to hear people whining about “It's too far away.“ when they tell me they won't be attending. Especially with the great airfares available now.

And as these pictures demonstrate, without Mrs. du Toit around this year I'll probably have to have one of my range officiers watching Kim extra close this year.  Not for safety violations but with a camera so I can subsidize the payback of all the personal loans I made last year for the new explosives magazine with blackmail income.

Coming in second overall to Adam, who was shooting an open gun, was quite pleasing.  It was stage 3, which we shot last, where I lost the most points.  But even if I had shot it more in line with my potential I wouldn't have caught up to Adam.  If Adam doesn't make any mistakes, as he is often prone to, I can't touch him in speed although I usually do better in accuracy than he does.  This time he was shooting an open gun which gives him about a 10 or 15% advantage right off the top and although there were lots of no-shoot targets available he didn't hit any which is rather uncommon for him on stages like these.  He did make a couple mistakes however.  On stage 1 his time would have been at least one and a half seconds, if not two seconds faster had he not managed to insert an extra reload into it.  Notice that he already has the fastest time for that stage, 9.81 seconds.  He would have shot those 12 rounds, including one mandatory reload in right at eight seconds.  On stage 2 he forgot to “turn his television on” (his battery powered red-dot scope) which cost him probably two seconds but he still ended up with the best time.

Ry and I, with the help of a few spectators, tested four different mixes this afternoon.  One was a control, the same stuff we used at Boomershoot 2004.  We could only get one of six targets with the mix with the new fuel to go off with the .22 LR.  None of the old fuel without or without grit would detonate with the .22 LR.  However with the silica grit we did get smoke from all of them.  The coarse iron grit didn't do anything interesting at all.  I still have a free source of very fine iron grit that I plan to test out sometime.  Everything detonated just fine, assuming I got a solid hit, with the .223.  Of course I was only about 10 to 15 yards away so the .223 was just a means of “disposal“.

As always, “More tests are needed.”

I think I did fairly well on the IPSC match. I did poorly on the last stage but it wasn't exactly a catastrophe either. I expect I'll be #2 or #3. There is a small chance of coming in #1.

Today, as always, the people, no less than their courts, must remain vigilant to preserve the principles of our Bill of Rights, lest in our desire to be secure we lose our ability to be free.

Chief Justice Earl Warren

Tomorrow after the IPSC match Ry and I are going to be testing a modification for the recipe used at Boomershoot 2005.  I sort of stumbled upon an ingredient to use for the fuel in our explosives that at first glance looked to be cheap and easily available at the local hardware store.  In addition it has a lower auto ignition temperature and a higher heat of combustion.  Good things for making the explosive a little more sensitive and more powerful.  But looking closer it appears what we can get at the local store is mixed with water.  Water will be a problem for us.  I distalled out a few ounces for test purposes but unless it does surprisingly well it won't be used.  Ignoring the cost of the distallation the price for the end product will be the same as what we are currently paying.  And buying the pure product isn't any cheaper--at least from a quick survey of some chemical supply web sites.

Oh, well.  We have another thing to test as well.  We are going to add some iron “filings” (actually from a bandsaw) to see if it will make things easier to detonate and/or give us some cool sparks.

Anyone in the neighborhood (Moscow/Lewiston Idaho) is welcome to stop by and watch.  I expect we will start on the reactive target stuff about 13:00 or so.