Getting Equipped for the Boomershoot.  Remington 700 action, Hart heavy varmit barrel, HS Precision Stock, 8-32x50 scope, Precision Rifle Clinic...

Total cost: Too much for me to admit to in public

Take that!  You GFWs!!!!  Giving you something to REALLY worry about.  Ahhh... All warm and fuzzy inside. 

If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly.

David Hackworth

Due to neighbor complaints (I could sort of understand their concerns when stuff kept falling off the walls) I'm reducing the target volume on the largest targets this year.  I'm gluing part of an egg carton into the bottom of the 8“ target bodies prior to filling them with explosives.

I've measured the capacity and now the 8” targets have just about the same capacity as the 6” targets while still offering a larger shooting area.  I can get all the old egg cartons I want at the recycling center but the time involved is almost painful.  Including the cutting, fitting, and gluing it's taking right at five minutes per target.  Since I plan to have 60 of these size targets that means I'm going to be putting five hours of prep time just for these targets.  Well I guess the consolation is that if I loose money on the event this year it will reduce my loss in terms of $/hour.  Instead of earning -$1.00/hour I'll earn -$0.98/hour or some such thing.  That's better--isn't it?

For some of the background on this read my web pages on Reactive Targets--especially Project Nitro.  The recipe given there is obsolete, but it will still help you understand some of what follows.

The last year the targets just didn't detonate as well as they should have.  We changed the containers we used for the targets, we ground the NH₄NO₃ much finer that ever before, we used a KitchenAid^R mixer instead of hand mixing, and we put in a small amount of MnO₂ as coloring to help us tell when it was thoroughly mixed.  Too many variables and we discovered the problem just a week before the event.  We suffered through the event and then last fall I bought some books on explosives and detonation mechanisms and have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about what is going on with our mixture.  Some of my hypotheses were shot down after doing a few thought experiments.  Some others died after some field experiments.  My latest hypothesis is that when we grind the NH₄NO₃ it absorbed the liquid fuel (proprietary) and the KClO₃ isn't able to interact with the fuel as well during the detonation initiation phase.  This might also explain why the mixture becomes more and more difficult to detonate as the targets age--the fuel is absorbed more and more into the NH₄NO₃ and it's also possible it is evaporating through the container walls.  Fortunately if this hypothesis is correct the fix is easy--add more fuel and perhaps seal the containers better.  For maximum sensitivity the mix has always been very oxygen rich and I have wanted to add more fuel just to get more bang for the unit volume of target.  If adding more fuel works out I'll be pleased for more than one reason.

Most recently the ratio of NH₄NO₃ to fuel has been 24:1 by volume. This was based upon a density measurement from a long time ago with a different batch of NH₄NO₃ and I decided to measure the density again before doing these tests.  Previously I had measured a specific density of 0.96.  This time I came up with 0.875.  Ouch!  That could be making a difference too.  Time to redo all our sensitivity tests.  Tonight I finely ground four 500 mL batches of NH₄NO₃ and mixed in 20, 30, 45, and 60 mL of fuel in the respective batches.  That gives me ratios of 25:1, 16.7:1, 11.1:1, and 8.3:1.  I was amazed at how little of the fuel shows up in the 25:1 mix.  It's almost as if it doesn't exist.  I'm expecting that after letting it “soak” for a couple weeks even the 8.3:1 mix will look pretty “dry”.  After the next IPSC match (February 6^th) I'll mix in 125 mL of KClO₃ in each mixture and do the sensitivity tests while at the range.  This year I'm going keep tweaking things until we get everything working right again.

http://www.wherefreedomreigns.com/books.html

It sounds sort of like an Unintended Consequences story line.  From the website:

The year is 2018, seven years after the successful end of an American-led world war on terrorism, but the nation is now faced with an even more horrible prospect: a war against an enemy it can not defeat—itself. In the face of the gathering storm clouds of war, Jeremiah Kincaid, 59, the Republican Speaker of the House, struggles to mediate a growing firestorm of public debate over gun control. On the left is Alexander Webster, 49, the Democratic President, who halfway through his final term, decides to make the elimination of guns from America his legacy. On the right is Edward Morrissey, 61, the Republican Governor of Idaho, who bitterly opposes the President’s position.

Exacerbating the situation, militia seize a gun club built on Federal land in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, which the Park Service had closed. After losing patience with Morrissey’s handling of the problem, Webster sends in Army Rangers, and in the ensuing battle many men die. The militia’s handsome leader, Thomas Porter, 34, escapes. He is a multi-billionaire with a past shrouded in mystery. The massacre on the mountain sets in motion a sequence of events that eventually leads to the secession of Idaho from the Union. As the country falls apart around her, Sarah McGill, 34, a rising television network star, finds herself falling in love with two men; a dashing Army officer, Jake Kincaid, 36, the son of the Speaker of the House, and the enigmatic Thomas Porter; and what makes this drama of the human heart all the more poignant is that Jake and Thomas are long-lost brothers.

And volume two:

Driven by emotion rather than logic, President Webster approves an ill-advised plan to kidnap Governor Morrissey using Army Special Forces. However, the attempt fails, which drives the governments of six other western states to secede and form the Continental States of America with Morrissey as its President. Eventually, President Webster is left with no choice but to declare war on the new confederacy. The brutal civil war that ensues lasts for seven days and involves the most ferocious and devastating tank battles in history. By the time it ends, the blood of over one hundred thousand soldiers has been spilled on the savaged soil of the sorrowed nation.

As I obscurely mentioned a few days ago I had freezing rain to drive through on the way to work last Monday.  Here are a few pictures of the van after I arrive in the desert town of Richland Washington.

Then today I was doing some errands around town when my daughter Xenia and I saw smoke coming from across town.  I dropped her off at home and went to get the oil changed in the van.  The smoke was coming from only a few blocks away so I walked over and took a few pictures of the house fire.  It was set deliberately by the fire department for training purposes and to get rid of an old house.

It is well known and widely accepted that homo sapiens are vulnerable to lasting denial-of-service attacks involving pyrotechnically accellerated projectiles.

Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25
In a Usenet post:
Subject: Re: StegOS - taking steganography to the next level
Newsgroups: sci.cryp
Date: 2002-06-20 04:07:12 PST

I ran one of the tools I have on the bomb help log files (see also this).  What I find most interesting is the weekly data here.

It is a historical constant that the strong rule the weak, and any shade of liberty enjoyed by the weak is nothing more than the benevolence of the strong.  You need guns because the world is full of the strong, and not all of them are benevolent.

 John Fogh
 Insights Self Defense Instructor
 April 13, 1999
 Microsoft Gun Club Email Folder

I updated Boomershoot Blogging just a few minutes ago.  All the referral counts are up to date as well as changing “Dipnut at Isntapundit” status to 'yes' on attending.  I received his entry yesterday.  No payment because he has well over 100 referrals to boomershoot.org from his site.  I'm tempted to grep through the log file for each of the IP addresses and see if any of them made it to the entry fee page.  From my quick scan only a very few made it past the opening page.  You have to give him credit though.  His post was quite to the point and got the result he wanted.

So far that makes nine bloggers who will be attending.

As Ry at Mindless Bit Spew points out there exist people in the gun communitity that have some sort of issue with homosexuals (and others with race).  I went to the forum on AR15.com that Ry was complaining about and I sort of lost it.  I posted the following:

Is there some connection between firearms and sexual orientation that I am unaware of?

I try my best to recruit people that traditionally vote against gun rights into the gun rights movement and it only takes a few jerks with a random comment here and there to undo everything. Do you want to engage in a civil war to maintain your right to keep and bear arms? Or would you rather subvert the evil party that keeps trying to take our freedoms away?

Examples of some of my efforts:

Palouse Pink Pistols IPSC match
Palouse Pink Pistol Article in local paper
AP version of above story
Seattle Time Editorial based on interview with me
Palouse Pink Pistols website (I'm a charter member)
Missoulia Montana article on Boomershoot
Newsweek article on Boomershoot
Outside Magazine article on Boomershoot

When I talk to liberal reporters and writers I want to be able to dispel their stereotypes of gun owners being red necked, racist, gay-bashers. They think that if we have guns we will shoot people just because we don't like the color of their skin or because we saw a couple guys holding hands. I want to be able to say that we just want to enjoy our sports, protect our homes, families, and communities. That we aren't a threat to anyone except those that would do us grave injury. And I feel like I am stabbed in the back when this kind of crap happens. I can spend hundreds of hours on pro-gun activism and have it all pissed away by ONE person talking trash. People believe what they want to believe and if they hear just one person make a derogatory comment or see just one post that confirms their bigoted beliefs about us then my efforts have just been flushed down the toilet.

If you don't believe me about how fearful they are (to the point of being irrational) take a look at this email I got from a lesbian friend of mine.

I don't care if you have strong feelings against gays but please don't express them in the context of firearms. You just shoot us all in the foot when you do that. Please, please, shape up. We are slowly starting to win this war against us and the people on the front lines do NOT appreciate having jerks sticking it to us from the rear.

It's been quiet over there for several hours now so maybe I made my point.  I hope so.  I'm still pissed though.  I'm going to be cranky for a few days.

Ry, thanks for pointing that out.  I know you have mentioned it to me before and I didn't respond.  This time the stars were aligned just so and I got pretty heated up.

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; also he lives precariously, and at discretion.

James Burgh
Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses
London, 1714-1775

Is it just my bias? Or are the anti-gun people just naturally hypocrites? Anti-freedom advocate Michael Moore isn't the first to hire an armed bodyguard. Senator Diane Feinstein has (or at least had) a handgun carry permit, Rosie O'Donnell has (or at least had) a bodyguard for her son who was licensed to carry a gun. Ted Kennedy has armed bodyguards (with submachine guns the last I hear). Chicago's Mayor Daley has armed bodyguards. Chicago city council members voted to exempt themselves from the city's gun restrictions and numerous members carry their own guns. Sarah Brady gave her son a hunting rifle as a Christmas gift. And that's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

You would think their followers would get a clue. Can you imagine the outrage if it was discovered the Pope had a girlfriend and was on the pill? Or how about if President Bush's daughters had abortions? Or the party that is an advocate for the little guy in America and campaign finance reform accepted tens of millions of dollars of political aid from some rich foreigner? Oh, sorry on that last example, that was the same set of people advocating gun control for everyone but themselves.

Update: There are apparently several errors in the report on Moore.  But he has hired armed guards so my comments stand.

Bolt Actions speak louder than words.

Jayson AKA SAVOIE 6
From http://www.snipersparadise.com/quotes1.htm

As pointed out by Ms. Malkin Stalin is back in favor.  I guess this isn't too surprising.  As I pointed out a month ago there were large numbers of people celebrating the anniversary of his birth, saying he was “a wise leader”, and claiming “our people will never be able to do without a leader like Stalin.“  Never mind the millions of his own people he murdered.  I don't really understand it, but then it's irrational to expect people to be rational.  And it's a reminder that “eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” (Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852).

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll keep saying it.  The U.K. needs to be liberated.  The latest story is:

A Conservative Parliamentary candidate has been suspended after he was pictured on the internet with a range of guns, rifles and a hunting knife.

An inquiry is now to be held into why Robert Oulds, the prospective MP for Slough in Berkshire, appeared with the weapons in the camera phone images.

A party spokesman said: "We take this matter extremely seriously.

"We have suspended Mr Oulds from the list of candidates, and as candidate for Slough, with immediate effect."

The guns and knife were all legal (as if such a law were any more valid than one outlawing political expression).  There were no laws broken.  No one was threatened.  Why do they allow such repressive politicians to continue breathing?

Others have weighed in on this too:

• The Smallest Minority
• Kim du Toit

Of course we have Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and Canada that should be liberated first so we can't exactly run over to England and help those guys out until we clean out the local tyrants first.

I just had a counter intelligence (CI) guy leave my office.  He viewed my graphs, some of the email I receive, and described it as “a mini gold mine”.  He was pleased I have information going back to 2000, that the site is still up, and I'm willing to work with them (I offerred to give them the portion of the logs where bombs were mentioned)..

He works with web logs on a daily basis and has tools he wrote himself to parse the web logs.  I'm so thrilled.  Finally I can get this information to the proper agencies and don't have to worry if I have “done enough” to prevent some kid from blowing up his school, or some terrorist wanting to float a barge with a ton of explosives down the Thames.

It's kind of ironic, the CI guy's office is directly above mine in this building.  I've been in this office for two and a half years and the guy that was the answer to my concerns was so close.

Update: I just got a call from the CI guy.  He has a “customer” for the bomb logs.  I'll sort through my log files and deliver the bomb related stuff to him next week.

Coronation: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.

Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary

Actually Boomershoot.org is.  Do a google search (without the quotes) for “simple bomb help”.  Same with Yahoo.  Same with Ask Jeeves.

I'm wondering if something like search engine placement is causing some of the flucuations in the number of searches I get rather than some worldwide change in the interest of bomb building.

I received an update from Eugene on the status of the clinic.  This is the earliest it has ever filled up.  He is accepting standby positions however.

I updated the blogger referral numbers just a few minutes ago too.  Most of the numbers are overstated just a bit because I didn't filter out the search engines web crawlers.  Another known error is that I didn't include all the referrals from AR15.com (209 unique IP referrals this month) which were all via Ry's postings.  Since AR15.com isn't his blog I didn't credit him with them on the page but I did include some of his lesser known websites that have links to boomershoot.org.  He gets a free Boomershoot coat, free entry, free shirts, and still I am indebted to him.

This is an even more blatant example of When Prophecy Fails related to the ballistic fingerprinting debacle.

Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, said police are not using the database enough, instead relying on a national ballistics database that only has ballistics images from crime scenes. As a result, she said, the national database can't lead investigators directly to the specific firearm that produced a recovered ballistic image unless the gun is eventually recovered.

She said scrapping the state program could deal a setback to better ballistics imaging.

"I think it's a real tragedy because other states are looking at New York and Maryland to see how we succeed with this," she said.

“To see how we succeed with this.”????  The possibility it has failed is apparently not in her domain of thought processes.

Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people; without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom. Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms.

Neal Knox
From Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
Vol. 4, No. 7
June 1996

His obituary is here.  He left us a personal message.  He was small in stature but a giant in the fight for freedom.  He was 69.

As I was driving through four hours through the freezing rain to work today (they sent everyone home by the time I got there) I got a call from a Engineering Project Handler, Field Report Department at UL.  He wanted us to send him the heater than had the burned plug.  Since I was rather busy at the time I asked him to send me an email about it.  He did.  The important part of the letter is below:

Hello Mr. Huffman,

I spoke with you on the phone regarding the investigation I am conducting on the subject product.  It would be very helpful for UL to examine the faulty product so that we can try and determine the cause of failure.  Please sent the sample to my attention at the below address.

He also asked we send a copy of the postage receipt so he can reimburse us.  And he said once the investigation is complete he will provide as much detail about the results of the investigation as he can.

Following up on my post from last Thursday I created an Excel spread sheet with the Brady 2004 Report Card, the FBI 2003 Uniform Crime Reports, and the CDC reported suicide rates from 1990-1994.  I wish all the dates matched up better, but that was the best I could find with a modest amount of searching. The crime/suicide was expressed in terms of rates per 100K and the Brady grades were assigned a numerical value.  Then the correlation of the crime/suicide rates with the Brady Grades was computed.  The correlations I obtained were:

Violent Crime	Murder	Forcible Rape	Robbery	Assault	Suicide
0.07	-0.12	-0.31	0.38	0.01	-0.63

The Violent Crime category is the total of the murders, forcible rapes, robberies, and assaults. 

Correlation is a number between 1.0 and -1.0.  A 1.0 would mean a perfect match between a good Brady Grade and the rate of crime/suicide occurring.  A 0.0 would mean there is no apparent connection, and a -1.0 would a perfect match between a good Brady Grade and the crime/suicide rate decreasing.  As you can see it appears that overall violent crime is unrelated to Brady Grades.  Robberies show a modest increase with a good Brady Grade, and rapes tend to decrease with a good Brady Grade.  Suicide rates show a fairly strong decrease with a good Brady Grade.

This is consistent with the recent National Academy of Sciences report.  From their news conference:

The literature on "right-to-carry" laws has obtained conflicting estimates of their effects on crime, despite the fact that data and methods used in these studies differ in only minor ways. Thirty-four states have enacted these laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns. However, we found no credible evidence that such policies either decrease or increase violent crime.

...

And although research does show associations between gun availability and suicide with guns, that research does not show whether such associations reflect actual cause and effect.

What should I expect with three hours of research?  Nothing earth shaking here.  The Brady Campaign wants to restrict our freedoms but would be unable to promise any improvement in the violent crime rate.  On the other hand we can't say the violent crime rate would go down if they would repeal the repressive gun laws either.

If you download the spreadsheet you might want to check my numbers.  Make sure I copied the crime rates correctly, did my calculations correctly, etc.  Let me know if you find mistakes.

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

Akhenaton
Egyptian pharaoh c 1350 BC

With the latest round of entry fees I paid off $400 on the loan and bought a new generator.  The one we used last year and it's back up both failed.  I wanted this one.  But ended up buying this one. I was so tempted to pay $200 more for 2500 fewer Watts and 70 fewer pounds.

3500 W is more than I will probably use.  I got by on 600 W from '98 until '03 but things have a way of expanding to consume the resources available.  A friend is working on a machine to produce the explosives without blenders and Kitchen Aid mixers.  Just dump in the raw materials on one end and then package the output from the other end.  No idea how much power it will consume--assuming it works and is safe.  Plus there are the lights.  I can power lots of lights now...