Author Archives: Lyle

A story in one bullet

Posted on by

In 1860s America the percussion revolver was the prominent fighting handgun. The 44 caliber, or “44/100ths calibre” was so named at the time because of the gun’s bore. Today we tend to use groove diameter to define caliber, but then why does a modern 44 use a .429″ bullet and a 38 use a .357″ bullet?

Much of the answer lies in this one bullet. When the 44 caliber percussion revolver was converted to fire metal cartridges, it presented the following challenges. The cartridge case of course had to fit into the percussion cylinder chambers, and had to fire a bullet of around .452″ to fill the grooves in a 44 caliber bore. SO the metal case had to fit inside a .452″ or so chamber, and fire a .452″ or so bullet, AND therefore the bullet had to have a heel base of around .429″ to fit inside the metal case. Such is the 44 Colt cartridge. It was built for cartridge conversions of percussion cylinders. It’s a 44 caliber because of the naming convention of the time which went by bore, rather than groove diameter, it uses a .452″ bullet and has a .429″ heel to fit in the case.

From that transition cartridge we see the seeds of how a modern “44” came to have a .429″ bullet. A similar thing occurred with the conversion of 36/100ths calibre percussion revolvers, and that’s how a 36 used a .380″ bullet and how a modern 38 uses a .357″ bullet.

Merry Christmas

Posted on by

And if we’re going to acknowledge the reason for the season (or is it the season for the reason?), well;

“It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn'”

That’s from an old song of course. I found it had a certain ring to it.

Black lives matter

Posted on by

That is one of the communists’ protest lines. But of course they don’t mean it, and Glenn Beck proves it.

They did a great job this morning.

By their lack of response to, or even discussion of, the high crime and violence rates in some of our Democrat-controlled cities, Obama and Company, Van Jones and other mayors, and the left in general, reveal their true intentions. They don’t give a DAMN about black lives. In fact, they continue to push harder for more of the same garbage that helped to create the problem, and they will not stop. They can not stop, for to stop making things worse would require the abandonment of their entire narrative AND trillions of dollars in confiscation and re-distribution schemes.

They’re trapped, in a sense. Everything they’ve striven for in the last 100+ years is going to come crashing in on them. Some of them actually want that. Not one of them understands the implications.

Some people get it

Posted on by

Meet Jonathan Gentry.

This is what happened as I see it now. The Party of the KKK, the Party of Progressivism and Margaret Sanger, saw what was happening in the 1960s, and saw that they could not stop it. So they got out in front of it. It’s a standard tactic of the left; if you can’t stop it, at least take some credit for it, join in, and steer it your direction or otherwise work it to your advantage. Co-opt it.

Now the Democrats have over 90% of Black Americans in their back pocket, keeping them angry, keeping them feeling sorry for themselves, keeping them hopeless, and thus keeping them voting Democrat. Meanwhile far more black babies are being aborted, as a percentage, than white babies, and the black family has been degraded such that Black mothers turn increasingly to the government as a surrogate father. Margaret Sanger, right there. She and Woodrow Wilson both loved the KKK.

In summary; the Democrats, with help from Uncle Toms like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson and promoter of violent revolution Lewis Farrakhan, are trying to turn black Americans into the objects of hate that they’ve always been for Progressives. And as a two-fer, they’re also trying to turn police into the “pigs” that the hippie/beatnik/communist/Progressives said they were back in the ’60s.

Same thing has been happening with the feminist movement, by the way. It’s standard playbook. Co-opt a budding pro-liberty movement and turn it into a tool of agitation, of anti-liberty, anti-rights, anti-capitalist anti-human activism. It’s happening all around you.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is frozen stiff with fear, and anger at their own base. They didn’t get into politics to fight. They didn’t run for office to be harangued and maligned, yet that’s what they’re facing, and they’re making it worse the longer they sit on their hands and play their stupid games. They will never lead. Principled leadership has been bred out of the Party. Forget the parties. They’re done. Totaled. FUBAR. It’s up to the People.

Edited to add; Here are a few famous and very loved Progressives, spilling the beans;

Early 20th Century playwright and darling of the Progressives, George Bernard Shaw.

Democrat President Woodrow Wilson and his pro KKK movie “Birth of a Nation”.

Margaret Sanger, early 20th Century Progressive, revered to this day, on the “Negro Problem” and the purpose of advocating birth control. Sound familiar? It should. It was the inspiration for the German National Socialist’s Eugenics programs, and their Final Solution, which we now know as The Holocaust.

And we’ll wrap it up with another all-time darling of the Progressives all my life and even to this day, Helen Thomas on what they view as the Jewish Problem.

They must be laughing like hell at the fact that they actually managed to get the American black and Jewish votes wrapped up, and that no one called them out on it all this time.

It’s all in the interpretation

Posted on by

We often pick on authoritarians for being hypocrites and liars, which of course they are, that is, in the big picture or from the standpoint of principles. We must be careful though in interpreting their words. When Obama said this a while back, he was being perfectly honest and consistent;

“The biggest problems we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I am president of the United States of America.” — Senator Barak Obama, March 31, 2008

I say he was laying his intentions right out in the open, for all to see. T-ball. George Bush was trying to bring more and more power into the executive, and Obama intended to reverse that by instead doing it himself.

You just have to understand it from their perspective as competing, or fellow, authoritarians. One professional boxer may very well intend to beat the snot out of another professional boxer, but that does NOT mean he’s opposed to boxing. Look at it this from the perspective of rival gangs;

“The biggest problems we’re facing right now have to do with The Eastside Gang trying to exercise more and more power in this town, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I become Leader of the West Side Gang.”

It’s not that the prospective leader of The Westside Gang is saying he’s anti-gang, is it? But the inattentive, or the wishful thinker, may see it that way if he chooses. Our prospective gang leader’s fellow gangsters on both sides of town know exactly what he’s saying, though the words are chosen to appeal to a broader audience consisting of largely distracted and de-moralized victims of gang intimidation.

Likewise, in W.W. II in Europe there were three competing gangs: Italian Fascists, German National Socialists and Russian communists. Then, American Democratic Socialist (or progressive communist, i.e. Progressive) FDR got the U.S. into the fray. It was not at all a war of opposing ideologies, but one of competing authoritarian systems and separate gang interests competing for turf. Same goes for Democrats and Republicans, on a “good” day. On a bad day (which is more common now) they all work together against their common enemies, which are reason, human dignity, independence, justice and liberty.

Understand all of that and the whole world makes a lot more sense, and you’ll rarely if ever be left wondering what the hell just happened.

Hat tip; Tam

Apitir

Posted on by

Years ago I read about a fascinating pistol target device described by Jeff Cooper as an Apitir. I searched for it at the time and found nothing. I later forgot the name, which I knew only as an odd name starting with an A. After rediscovering Cooper’s description and searching for it just now, I still find nothing. If anyone is building them, or has build even one, they haven’t posted it on line by the name Apitir, and almost no one has been talking about it.

Cooper describes it in the sixth item on this page. It’s a great idea, Cooper wanted it to be widely embraced, and since no one else is talking bout it, at least under that name, well, there it is for you to ponder.

It shouldn’t be difficult to build, but I don’t quite understand what he meant by “actuated by the shooter…with the shooting hand.” Maybe he intended that your pistol be holstered as you pull a cord or some such, and then as the disks begin to roll you draw, aim and fire. My (apparently incorrect) memory of it was that you’d shoot a central target, which would release the two rolling disks. He did not indicate the angle, or pitch, of the sloped runners. A variable slope would allow you to experiment, or change the difficulty, as desired. Some experimentation would be in order, to find a rail design that reliably keeps the disks on track, and lets them fall off when hit.

I remember thinking that a magazine full of the disks, and a feeding mechanism, would allow for several actuations, or tries, before having to reset the thing. That would make it more complicated and expensive, but far more useful.

If I had any trust that it would remain unmolested by rifle fire for a number of years, I’d have one built and keep it at the Peterson range. Something like that would make a pretty sweet rifle target though, too.

One compromise design, or variation, would replace the steel disks with clay “jackrabbits” or similar targets.

University of Idaho advocating crimes against gun owners

Posted on by

Via ammoland; University of Idaho “Executive Director for Public Safety and Security” (nod nod, wink wink), Matt Dorschel, has openly advocated abusing the 911 system to harass peaceable gun owners, potentially leading to another “SWATting” of an innocent person.

Intentional misuse of the 911 system is one crime, and this jackass (and anyone who takes his advice) is also committing a federal crime, violating 18 USC 241 “Conspiracy Against Rights”.

This warrants calls and letters to the Latah County Sheriff’s department, the U. of I. president, your ID State Representatives, and to the Governor’s office. The Moscow, ID Police Department contracts with the University of Idaho for campus security, to the tune of around a million dollars, or so I was told, which in this tiny town is a HUGE pile of cash. There’s a major conflict of interest there, and I wouldn’t bother with the city PD for that reason. We have a criminal in our midst, and we’re paying the son of a bitch.

Someone inside the U. of I. I.T. system needs to get hold of Dorschel’s e-mails and other communications before his “hard drive fails”. Pronto!

Hat Tip; Info Wars

Regarding primers…

Posted on by

…and getting testy;
There is total energy, and then there is peak power, time to peak power (which in audio circuitry we referred to as “rise time”) and duration of peak or near peak power. So you’d likely want to be able to graph it as power over time, to “really know” what’s happening. Point being of course that total energy would be somewhat inconsequential unless the power were up to a certain level for a certain period.

But maybe you got it just like that already. If so, carry on. Don’t mind me sitting in the corner and muttering.

A Southerner Repents

Posted on by

Fred’s confession.
Good point, and if I may be so bold, it is right along the lines of what Cliven Bundy tried to say, but stumbled in his inability to articulate and was then pounced upon by all sides. Thomas Sowell said it too, as have many others who never got accused of racism for it.

The truth is a hot-button issue. You have to know what you’re doing when speaking it. It’s not for everyone. Fred can handle it fine.

Could the Republican Party be any more ridiculous?

Posted on by

I get several messages from the NRSC and other Republican interests daily. They’ve been “name dropping” Mitt Romney, McCain, Carl Rove, and other flabby, pasty-white, clueless, Progressive/elitist dry-balls, as though THAT were they way to get us pumped-up and writing checks– Trot out the guys who made conservatives stay home in the last two presidential elections. I’ve also gotten a few messages saying I could WIN, get this… a STICKER! That I could PUT on my VEHICLE! (squeeeeee!…count me in! Not).

My question for all of you is; could they appear more ridiculous and impotent if it were their prime directive to do so?

I maintain that they could get more support if they all got together, got stinking drunk on bad liquor, took off their clothes, buggered a herd of sheep on video and put that out as their campaign ads, with “Vote Republican and Bugger the Sheep!” as their main slogan. Unlike what they’ve been saying and doing, that COULD be interpreted as actually meaning something.

Well, there’s always the Contender

Posted on by

Via TFB, we see The Dominator, a 308 Winchester upper for the 1911. OK then. As Cooper was fond of saying; I suppose we should refrain from asking “why?” I don’t know what it’s for, but it is interesting from a gadgetry liker’s point of view. If it were a choice between the two I think I’d take the Thompson Center Contender. Hmm; how about a 300 Win Mag upper for your LCP, then, for, you know, uh…practice, or something, so when you’re out shooting for defense with your .380 it would serve as low recoil practice for big game hunting.

Male Dog Senator

Posted on by

I get a lot of spam. First thing in the morning, and right before I shut down in the evening, I empty the spam bucket. I also empty it during the work day, so this evening I only had three messages in the bucket. I’ve gotten so I can filter out the rare legitimate message amongst all the chaff pretty efficiently. This time I did a quick glance at the first word of each title;
Male
Dog
Senator

Harmonic convergence. There are two kinds of dog senators. The attack dog Democrats, and the Republican dogs that only know how to heel, sit, stay, roll over and beg. Mostly beg. Republicans seem to think that they need my money to win elections, which is bizarre because in reality all they have to do is stand up for a few basic, simple principles. Doing that, they’d get so much attention from the hysterical media and the community organizers (but I repeat myself) that they’d never need to spend another dime on campaigning. We’d just see who’s getting attacked the most for starving children, making children fat, kicking old people out into the streets with no food or medicine, making war for oil, creating bad weather, handing free assault rifles out to kids in school playgrounds, destroying everything the left has worked for in the last hundred years and so on, and vote for them. Totally free advertizing, 24/7/365 on 100 TV channels, all the sports networks, and all radio channels at once. All the money in the world could scarcely buy that kind of promotion.

And for you in the NRSC; you’re pathetic. I can spot your ridiculous attempts to appear chummy, with your e-mail titles, in under 6.5 milliseconds, which means I can ignore a thousand of your pleas-for-money in six and a half seconds or less.

Kit Gun

Posted on by

OK, so I’ve been ignorant. Laugh and make fun of me and get it out of the way. Tam posted about a “Kit Gun” recently. I’d seen that term many times, and it’s always been used as though everyone understood what it meant and there was therefore no point in trying to explain it. Kind of like the high school meetings I missed because, well, “We told everyone” they said (meaning they told a few people and assumed everyone else would hear it from them. I was always out of the loop because I only attended half days my senior year. It was a good excuse to avoid pep rallies anyway.

I searched “kit gun” some time ago and came up with nothing helpful, but doing it just now I found it! A kit gun means it goes with you on hiking and camping trips, and the term comes from the “kit bag” that a hiker or camper might carry. Well I’ve hiked and camped all my life and never heard of a “kit bag”, so the term “kit gun” has been not at all obvious to me. I somehow missed that memo. I suppose everyone knew about all this but me.

That makes just about every gun I own a “kit gun”, technically, since I would take most any of them along on a camping trip or a hike, and have done so in most cases, but I guess the term refers to one that’s generally more handy (smaller and/or lighter) than some other similar gun in a similar caliber, kind of how a “carbine” is a relatively shorter and lighter version of a particular rifle. As far as I can determine through observation of usage though is that a “kit gun” refers to a handgun only, not a long gun, even though I do have what might be called a “kit bag” that holds a long gun. So a relatively light and handy rifle equals “carbine”, while a relatively light and handy handgun equals kit gun. Is that about right?

Does this mean that ANY service pistol is a “kit gun” simply because soldiers tend to hike about and are known to camp?

Just learned this today, so it may be flawed. I’ve ordered “gun kits” before but apparently those do not necessarily qualify as “kit guns”, though there may be such a thing as a “kit gun kit” from which you build your own kit gun.

OK, so there MUST be a term for a light or small and handy shotgun that I’ve never heard. “Coach gun” maybe, but that’s a side by side with exposed hammers, in my mind anyway, which would exclude many other light and handy shotguns.

Organized thought of the day*

Posted on by

Regarding the “packing” of courts (with judges sympathetic to one’s cause), which has been in the news recently; our U.S. constitution, very specifically and strenuously, demands “court packing”. It demands that ALL judges, justices, politicians and law enforcement be committed to the American Founding Principles. It is designed specifically to be as“Unfair” as possible.

When we’re talking about “court packing” then, we must be very specific. Are we talking about packing the courts with people unwaveringly dedicated to liberty, or are we talking about packing courts with people who are open to the idea of coercion?

Historically, this country was already “done in” in that regard by the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration. By 1945 the destruction of America was generally embraced. By 1970 there was so little America left that hardly anyone remembered the difference. So this has been a long time coming, which is what Progressivism is all about.

*Poking fun at Joe’s recurring “Random thought of the day” post title (if one may have random thoughts, surely one might, potentially, on occasion, have organized ones).

What is it?

Posted on by

I built this gadget around 20 years ago. It’s been in use on a mountaintop ever since, until being brought down to my shop today. Three of the cylinders are marked “C” and the other three are marked “L”.

I remember having it the back of my 1966 Chrysler Town and Country station wagon parked across the street from the Federal Building in Moscow, Idaho right after the Oklahoma City bombing and wondering if I was going to get hassled for it.

The Gadget

The Gadget

Refusing to enforce gun laws

Posted on by

Nullification, as it should be. It isn’t generally discussed (such discussion would ruin the anti-rights, i.e. Progressive, narrative) but taking that oath not only allows an individual in law enforcement to judge the constitutionality or legality of an order or a law, it requires it.

That is its whole and only purpose. They don’t take an oath to blindly follow orders, or to obey the Dear Leader or any such nonsense as happens in more backward societies. They take an oath to uphold the constitution. That is not a trivial distinction. Those are functionally opposite concepts, so long as the constitution in question supports human rights. I’d rather they take an oath to uphold human rights (and prove that they understand the meaning of same) being as the constitution is valid only to the extent that it recognizes and protects human rights.

Know which side your sheriff serves!

Calling it ‘Ignorance’ is being generous

Posted on by

I had thought it was well understood that one of the tactics of the anti rights movement has been to blur the distinction between fully automatic and semi automatic firearms (the former being ultra-restricted and therefore ultra-expensive and prohibitive and the latter being widely available and affordable). Apparently I’ve been very wrong.

Coyness apparently remains one of the most successful ruses for the anti liberty movement, even today when we have so much information at our fingertips that ANYONE who cares enough to jiggle his fingers over a keyboard for a few seconds can learn just about anything that is known by anyone.

That proves that most of us in the pro-liberty camp still fail to understand what we’re up against.

KNOW THY ENEMY!

It has been well-documented that anti-rights activists have spoken about, and organized efforts aimed at, confusing the issue of full verses semi auto, and yet we still would rather have fun pointing out the “stupidity” of people like Don Lemon. Well the joke’s on us, people.

More to the point though; if we were standing on principle, the distinction between full and semi wouldn’t matter. The Progressives have had most of us cowed for generations into accepting the NFA, and “defending” ourselves by accepting THEIR premise that, “Oh, well yeah– NO one wants machineguns ‘on the streets’! No-no-no-no!”

And so it’s an interesting play we’re in. The antis are using our own faults against us, by fooling people into making a distinction (which they’re trying to blur now) that only matters because they’ve been successful in fooling or intimidating us.

It’s the very definition of Progressivism. Get us comfortable with one outrage (in this case the NFA) and use that as a stepping stone to the next outrage (conflating semis with the already successfully demonized autos).

Far from calling Don Lemon an idiot or an ignoramus then, I’d say he’s pretty damned clever. So far he appears to have fooled 100% of the commenters on that Beck article.

If it’s not true it should be

Posted on by

Dan here at UltiMAK told me recently that the word “understand” comes from building, or dwelling construction, long ago. If you were going to add a floor atop an existing structure, you would need to “understand” the structure so as to prevent catastrophic failure (that is to say; support with additional stands underneath). If your building collapsed, you failed to “understand”.

That would make our current usage another of the many euphemisms that we no longer know to be euphemisms (at least I never knew – maybe you all heard it before, or maybe it’s not true). It would also add a layer of perception to the word. If you fail to “understand” you failed to acquire, or to take the time to construct, the requisite foundation and lower level structure to support what you just saw or heard, and so it collapses in on you.

IF by Rudyard Kipling

Posted on by

Via the late Jeff Cooper.

No wonder we were not introduced to Kipling in school.

I can explain it to you, but I cannot make you understand

Posted on by

I designed the UltiMAK optic mount for the Kalashnikov to align itself with the barrel (fancy that). There is a radius on the underside, which engages the barrel (something like. V-block, but we’ll call it an “interrupted radius”) so as the clamp screws are tightened, it simply WILL align with the barrel unless something interferes with that process. The “something” that can interfere is the gas block or the rear sight block, or more specifically, a radical misalignment of the gas block with the rear sight block.

The mount has several features that allow it to accommodate a slight to moderate misalignment of those two parts, and so there is a fraction of one percent of AKs (usually Romanian) that cannot properly accept the UltiMAK mount, but I digress.

Continue reading →