Quote of the Day
If you don’t own a rifle, your opinion is mostly irrelevant.
Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, August 14, 2024
There is a surprising amount of truth in this. This is particularly true in the political arena.
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
Hm. I don’t own a rifle. I suppose I should correct that omission.
Yes, you should. Everyone should own a rifle. And a Pistol. And a shotgun.
I don’t bird hunt and since retiring from the military I have no reason to blow off hinges using 12 gauge breaching charges. Why should I buy a shotgun instead of another Armalite pattern rifle or a nice lever action?
Home defense?
Unlike Joe Biden, I can use a handgun or pistol caliber carbine effectively for home defense
They do make Armalite pattern shotguns now.
But simple short pithy answer of course is “TEOTWAWKI”
Michael Collins and Menachem Begin ran a resistance mostly with pistols and bombs. And of course an organization. One of Collin’s most effective strategies was an organized shunning of the RIC and their families. Essentially drove them out of the rural areas which became an IRA sanctuary. When your wife can’t buy groceries and no one will talk to your kids at school, it tends to undermine morale. And his most famous single exploit-the attack on British intelligence operatives in Dublin-was done with pistols.
Maybe one wouldn’t have to run a resistance with pistols and bombs if one’s countrymen had rifles in the first place.
Pistols are concealable which is most useful when fighting a superior force. And bombs are just a superior weapon.
There will always be a place for reaching out and touching an individual from a kilometer away.
Just finished reading “Fry the Brain” which is back in print and updated. Available from Amazon. Topic is urban sniping which includes a lot of insurgency stuff. Sniping from a klick away or more is mostly for the regular military and their support services. Insurgents and random terrorists like the DC snipers typically operate at much closer ranges. He considers the PIRA to be the masters of the technique including support services and especially counter forensics (gunshot residue and fibers etc) which you had better pay attention to if you plan to go up against a modern police state. He talks about drones as both a sniping weapon and as a counter-sniper. We are just beginning to see this and the impact is not really known. I would not want to try to escape a drone. Note that the Israelis have developed a phone app that lets random Iranians call in a drone strike on regime security forces. Basically sniping from 500 miles away with a spotter on the ground. You can be the best long range shooter in the world and you can’t deal with this.
Pistols are a firearm that are a compromise in every metric except concealability and everyday carry-ability.
Shotguns have their place in close range firepower, sporting/hunting purposes, and general flexibility according to available ammunition.
Rifles exert power within range. That’s a power for the citizen that the state can’t control. And that’s why if the people generally had rifles, they wouldn’t have to resort to (admittedly necessary) terrorism tactics: the oppressors wouldn’t have arisen, or at least not in enough strength that they couldn’t calculate the possibility that they’d have to factor in rifles from any open line of sight.
Based on the size of a standard sheet of printer paper*, “If I can see it, I can hit it” is a quite useful level of applied power; to a Rifleman, 400 meters isn’t much, but it’s just a few feet short of a quarter mile. That “quarter mile” means enforcing command over a radius encompassing 31 acres.
800 meters – about 875 yards – is easily within the capability of a Good Rifleman (specifically, not a Great Rifleman) with a Good Rifle; that radius under command goes up to 125 acres. Look at your AO on a topographical map and overlay it with to-scale 125 acre circles, taking terrain into consideration; how many Good Riflemen do you need to exert full command over the entire AO? What’s the minimum number to achieve influence?
Handguns, absolutely, have their place, but that place is defined by ease of portability and related primarily to defensive needs; Rifles, on the other hand, lean more toward Offense. They can, of course, certainly be used in defense and very often are, but the greatest reward in their employment comes when, proactively, skill and accuracy intersect at Offense.
* Hold a standard 8.5″ X 11.0″ sheet of paper with the top edge at your suprasternal notch and view yourself in a mirror, noting what organs, or substantial parts therof, are contained within the rectangle; how comfortable would you be knowing a Good Rifleman with a Good Rifle could, without magnification, see you? Not identify you, just see you? (Magnification on The Rifle is “a given” but observation with a 20/20 or 20/15 eye** and trained brain is the first step in the process.)
** Investigate “accuity of the human eye” specifically in sports; biology limits the human eye to 20/8 as a maximum, quite a few athletes, especially in baseball, come surprisingly close to that (a batter has about 390 milliseconds between ball release by the pitcher and arrival at the plate, the decision to swing, and how to swing, must fit into that time slot, so the sooner enough detail about “the pitch” can be discerned, and processed, the better); one occasionally hears about “combat eyes” – Chuck Yeager, famously, had them, as did, certainly, most other successful combat pilots (and sports stars) – which allow seeing the enemy farther out and identifying exactly which enemy sooner is a life saving advantage in combat and a necessaary one in sports.
Ted Williams too. He was both a sports star and combat pilot. In Korea he was wingman to John Glenn.
I suppose that would depend on what the opinion was in regard to….