Monthly Archives: September 2012

Quote of the day—Alan Korwin

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Meet with me and a few select others for counseling that will truly get to the heart of the matter. Let’s get past the firing mechanisms, types of lead or brand name intrigues and into the real-world answers that can reduce or stop this sort of behavior and make our world more safe. Together we can fix this.

Alan Korwin
August 27, 2012
Whatever Happened to Waiting Periods for Guns?
[The Brady Campaign want to have, “a thoughtful conversation that explores real, effective solutions to our national gun violence epidemic”. But the problem is that every single one of the ideas proposed by the Brady Campaign for the last 40 years has proven to be unconstitional and/or ineffective in reducing violent crime.

It’s time to try some different ideas. I know Korwin. I know people at the NRA. I know people at the Second Amendment Foundation. These are some very smart people. I have met and talked to numerous people from the Brady Campaign and Washington Ceasefire. I wasn’t impressed. They were evasive, easily angered, and/or ignorant. We are better than this.

The media and politicians have been riding a dead horse for 40 years. You would think it would be obvious that it is time to get off and ride a fresh one. But it is irrational to expect people to be rational.—Joe]

Toast

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I realize that predictions can be hard. Well, predictions are easy, but making accurate ones is a bit more difficult.

This week, the Chicago teachers union went on strike, turning down a 16% pay increase (4% per year for four years), even though they are one of the most highly compensated districts in the nation, while simultaneously turning in bottom quintile performance. Teachers unions are one of the most rabid pro-Obama groups out there. On the the other side of the dispute is Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, infamous for hard-nosed, in-your-face negotiation.

In Lybia, the US embassy was attacked and Ambassador Stevens was killed, and I’m now seeing reports that embassy security was being provided by Libyan nationals, who may have helped in his murder, NOT US Marines (the two that were killed there were last second additions when things got violent).

Obama has told Israel to take a flying leap in so many different ways recently it’s not easy to list them all, and it looks like they are getting itchy to pull the trigger on dealing with the Iranian nuke thing.

Prediction: If Obama doesn’t pull some serious magic out of his hat in the next week or so on at least two of these issues, he’s toast. Not just lightly toasted, but burned-to-a-crisp toast. Utterly humiliated. A defeat that will be compared to Carter for the rest of US history. Something that most American’s can’t stand is weakness in a leader, and pretty much all the options he might take on these three issues to appeal to his base will repel the undecided middle. On the other hand, any sort of strong action that might sway the persuadable middle his direction will infuriate much of his base, and do nothing to change minds among the conservative base. The optics are horrible for him no matter which way he goes, and the campaign spots nearly write themselves. Of course, he’s got the Mainstream Media flying air-cover for him, but even they can only do so much, and when it looks like he’s on a failing course they will turn on him to save the liberal ideology (by saying it was the messenger, not the message).

So, barring some actions he has so far shown absolutely no ability to perform, I think we are seeing a major turning point in the election.

Quote of the day—Suzanne Langland

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I know that big money, special interests, the gun lobby and cowardly, greedy politicians are to blame. BUT, WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE FROM THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY? Too many issues have been allowed to be pushed aside in this country. We need to change this. I urge you to demand that guns be banned and a Felony penalty imposed on those who would reject a federal gun surrender ALL GUNS ARE MADE TO KILL. WHATEVER SIZE THEY ARE AND HOWEVER QUICKLY THEY DISCHARGE THEIR BULLETS.

Suzanne Langland
September 7, 2012
Facebook comment.
[Special interests? How many people own guns versus how many want guns banned? It would appear to me that the people that want guns banned are the “special interests”.

In any case it’s nice to have their real agenda out in the open. Do not ever forget that they want you defenseless and/or in jail.—Joe]

I’ll be in my bunk

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I arrived back at my clock tower last night after being on the road for nearly 15 hours, got six hours sleep and went to work. Tonight I had the usual dinner and Sci-Fi video evening with son James and Kelsey.

I have lots of pictures and stories to share about Gun Blogger Rendezvous but I’m just too tired to do that tonight. Perhaps I’ll make some progress on that tomorrow night.

Quote of the day—Anonymous

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Now that you said “lubricant” I think I should shake your hand.

Anonymous
A woman at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous,
September 8, 2012
[No. It wasn’t me she was talking to. I was between her and the person she shook hands with.

In some ways this GBR was far more “interesting” than any previous one I have been to. There are stories from this event that will last a lifetime and will probably never be told involving a woman licking a stripper’s breast, whiskey to be licked off one another, 2 Women 1 Cup (DO NOT WATCH IT! I haven’t and neither should you), Jar Squatter (DO NOT WATCH IT! I haven’t and neither should you) and the hand on my thigh as a certain someone told me they were going to bed.

Being the guardian of morals that I am I took it upon myself to do something about this. I was able to get the two people I believe were most responsible for the decadence to agree to attend Boomershoot 2013.—Joe]

Beer guzzling hillbillies versus NYPD

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Last Sunday the Lewiston Pistol Club ran a USPSA stage which mimicked the NYPD shooting at the Empire State Building. Here are the results:

Stage No:

4

Police at Empire State Building

Place

Name

No.

Class

Division

Points

Penalties

Time

Hit Factor

Stage Pts

Stage %

1

Adam

13

M

Limited

80

0

7.09

11.2835

80.0000

100.00%

R2

Mark

22

U

Production

78

0

8.32

9.3750

66.4687

83.09%

3

Robert

20

U

Open

79

0

9.46

8.3510

59.2086

74.01%

4

Mark

12

U

Limited

78

0

9.53

8.1847

58.0295

72.54%

5

Joe Huffman

5

B

Limited

80

0

10.05

7.9602

56.4378

70.55%

6

Velle

8

U

Production

78

0

10.27

7.5949

53.8478

67.31%

7

Jon

9

U

Limited 10

78

0

10.40

7.5000

53.1750

66.47%

8

John

4

C

Limited

78

0

10.89

7.1625

50.7821

63.48%

9

Brian

17

U

Open

76

10

9.62

6.8607

48.6424

60.80%

10

Don

19

A

Limited

80

10

10.32

6.7829

48.0908

60.11%

11

KW

3

C

Limited

80

0

11.88

6.7340

47.7441

59.68%

12

Tim

11

U

Limited

79

0

12.09

6.5343

46.3282

57.91%

13

Bill

14

C

Limited

79

0

12.39

6.3761

45.2065

56.51%

R14

Roger

21

C

Production

80

0

12.61

6.3442

44.9804

56.23%

15

Kevin

7

B

Limited

74

10

10.66

6.0038

42.5669

53.21%

16

Barron Barnett

1

D

Limited

79

0

13.48

5.8605

41.5509

51.94%

17

Erik

15

C

Single Stack

79

0

15.24

5.1837

36.7524

45.94%

18

Kami

10

U

Limited

80

0

16.48

4.8544

34.4177

43.02%

19

Roger

18

C

Revolver

80

0

18.16

4.4053

31.2336

39.04%

20

Ben

2

U

Limited

68

20

12.71

3.7766

26.7761

33.47%

21

Jodi

6

D

Limited

75

20

15.83

3.4744

24.6335

30.79%

22

Donald

16

U

Limited 10

80

0

50.31

1.5901

11.2738

14.09%

The bottom line is that a bunch of beer guzzling, uneducated hillbillies fired 352 shots hitting no-shoot (innocent bystanders) targets twice and had three misses. This compares to NYPD firing16 shots with nine innocent people injured and six or more misses.

There is at least one important difference. The police were facing a guy pointing a .45 at them. We were not.

Quote of the day—Friedrich Nietzsche

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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche
[After dinner last night at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous several of us stayed up late talking. One of the topics was the inability of the anti-gun people to think logically. In many cases they claim to simple “know” the truth. Nietzsche was a pretty sharp guy.

See also this quote from Nietzsche.—Joe]

LAPD qualification results

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I got the USPSA match results back for the modified LAPD qualification stages I designed. In order to conform with USPSA rules we actually made the courses much harder than what the police officers have to do. We always started from the holster. In most of the strings the police started from the low ready position. In one string the police start with the gun pointed at the target and their finger on their trigger. Even starting from the holster the allocated three seconds was more than enough for us draw from the holster and make the same shot the police make.

We put 22 people through the stages. 20 people passed with a 60% or greater. That is 90.9% passage. The best results were by Roger who scored 95.1%. Roger was shooting a revolver.

GBR range report

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Today was the first range day for the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. I pretty much ignored everyone at the range today. I had a rifle that I needed to zero and test and Barron and I did little else.

At 200 yards I was disappointed:

WP_000174

My Spud Gun will yield a group about one third this size at this range.

I zeroed it and put the results in my ballistics app for my phone (still under development, not yet available).

The wind was a bit of a problem but the elevation was good on the steel at 350, 435, 500, 600, and 700 yards. We could hit without much difficulty so we moved out to the 957 yard targets.

We first started shooting at the barrel. It seemed that we were hitting all around it. I finally moved to the plate. It was smaller but I wanted a hard target. CLANG! First shot hit. The next shot was a miss, then two more hits. Barron then took a few shots at the plate. He did well too.

We concluded that we were poking holes in the barrel and seeing the dust kick up behind the it. We probably had a lot of hits on the barrel but just couldn’t be sure.

Still, getting three out of four hits on the plate with this gun was confirmation it is a good enough for most social occasions.

The long range results are similar to my previous attempts at the same target.

Winning

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From Cabela’s lobby:

WP_000166WP_000167

I found this on the inside bottom of the box of shoes I bought:

WP_000168

From the gun email list at work (via Jeremy):

BuyHerDiamond

People who actually DO things

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I installed an Aimpoint sight on a 500 S&W pistol for a guy today.  He lives in North Idaho and has been hunting here and elsewhere for 30 years.  He’d been in and out of our shop, trying to figure out how to make the little Micro sight stay put on his 500 bore, G-force production factory, so we’ve gotten acquainted.


Today he brought in one of his many hunting photo albums.  He keeps records of each harvest; date, details of the animal, distance, and so on. 


One of his kills was of a circa 2,000 lb Bison bull he got in South Dakota using a traditional muzzleloading rifle.  He used a 200 grain XTP 45 caliber handgun bullet in a 50 caliber sabot.  Muzzle velocity; ~2000 fps. (he could state his velocity extreme spread off the top of his head).  He knows his rifles and his trajectories from years of practical use.  That bull was shot from 150 yards.  I ran the numbers in Modern Ballistics, and the impact velocity would have been around 1280.  The jacketed hollowpoint bullet struck inside the front shoulder (so as to avoid the heavy shoulder joint, he said) in a quartering-toward shot, penetrated the heavy hide, busted a heavy rib, penetrated both lungs, the diaphram, and stopped in the spleen.  The bull walked a few yards, laid down and never got up, shot with what amounted to (energy-wise) a 45 magnum handgun.


Some (most)(no; virtually all) would say that his choice of round was drastically too fragile and drastically under-powered, taking a shot at the “practical” range limit of the firearm, but he’d worked with this system for years and knew it’s capabilities and limitations from experience.  Do not try this at home.


Anyway; it’s fun to talk with people who actually do things.


By the way; Installing the Micro sight on a 500 Smith requires the “permanent” red (as opposed to the “high strength” red) thread locker.  I had to special order it as no one in town knew it existed.  According to the tech I spoke with at Aimpoint, you also need to crank the cross-bolt down far beyond the 180-after-contact spec in the instructions, if’n you’re mounting it on the 500 hand cannon.  This time we used a ratchet wrench.  He’ll try it out tomorrow after the required 24 hour cure time and we’ll see if it worked.  I wish they’d go with a square cross bolt for high recoil applications, but in nearly all other applications it matters not a bit, one way or the other.

It’s time to move on

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Sometimes it takes a while for you to figure it out. Sometimes it’s easier to not “rock the boat” and just stay with what you have because of fear of the unknown. But there are times when it’s obvious you need to dump them, heal as best as you can and move on. As the woman in the video below point out after four years it’s now obvious what needs to be done.

No brainer

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It always annoys me that the most stupid and most ignorant are frequently the most vocal. Case in point:

It seems that gun control should be a no-brainer. Our city and other communities across this country have recently seen the tragic results of the misuse of guns by ordinary citizens, including by young teens.

When I was a growing up in Baltimore people felt safe. We went out alone at night; I often went to the library alone after dark at age 10. We never heard about shootings. They seemed to be only in cowboy movies.

The availability of guns to any two-legged creature who could talk changed all that. It’s true that human beings can get very angry, perhaps even angry enough to kill. But if guns weren’t so readily available that anger might be expressed in less lethal ways.

I doubt that the Founding Fathers meant for anyone to lawfully carry a gun.

The “availability of guns” has not gotten easier in Baltimore anytime in the last 100 years so I can’t imagine when Jeannette Ollodart Marx grew up and guns were less available than they are now. I have to believe she is ignorant and/or stupid. This conclusions has further support with her speculation about the Founding Fathers not intending for nearly everyone to be able to lawfully carry a firearm.

It would seem that if she is sufficiently self-aware Ms. Marx should be intimately familiar with no-brainers.

Overheard in reality

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Phone salesman; “How soon do you need it?  Right now, I suppose.”


Me; “Yeah, I have the thing apart, and the customer standing right here, waiting…


continued in my head…


… How much to get it here yesterday?”


Phone salesman; “All the money in the world, times infinity”


Me; “OK.  Do you take installment payments?”

The view

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It has been suggested (by Barron and Janelle) that I change the name of this blog from “The View From North Central Idaho” to “The View From The Clock Tower”.

While I got a chuckle out of this it is just a bit too over the top for me.

Besides, in addition to being afraid of heights should things go sufficiently “pear shaped” that a clock tower view might be of interest I think I would prefer a view from a R/C vehicle (air, land, or water) loaded with Boomerite.