Category Archives: Gun Fun

Quote of the day—Christopher Pearson

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Remember:
Birth control is not cleaning your guns…on the couch… in your underwear… every time she brings a boy over. It’s doing it on his couch.

Christopher Pearson
March 26, 2012
Via the gun email list at work.
[While this parenting technique has its merits it’s also probably a pretty good way to get your daughter pissed at you.

Not that I have any experience in that regard. But I will say that being about a foot taller than your daughter’s date, wearing all black, armed, wearing a Boomershoot coat and silently following about eight feet behind them for 50 yards as they leave the movie theater in the mall and out into the parking lot before they notice leaves an impression too.—Joe]

Climbing the Clock Tower stairs with my rifles

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Today I brought a couple rifles back to the Seattle area for cleaning and preparation for Boomershoot. I call my place “The Clock Tower”.

As I was climbing the stairs with my cased rifles and openly carried pistol on my hip I wondered what the response would be if someone in this liberal enclave saw me as I was lugging the precision rifles up the stairs. Should I hurry inside to reduce the time they have to figure out the contents of the cases? Should I stop and chat with them and invite them to the range or maybe even Boomershoot?

In either case will the friendly neighborhood SWAT team pay me a visit early tomorrow morning?

Somehow I doubt people lugging books or political signs up the stairs worry about the quite the same things I do. As long as people carrying books or guns into their home worry about the police breaking down their doors in the early morning hours we have more work to do.

Getting some schooling

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Today Ry, Barron, and I finished our first day of NROI training at the Lewiston Pistol Club. Ry and I figured we had driven the furthest since we came from the Seattle area. But it turns out someone else had driven from Winnemucca, NV. Even without him we would have had to share the title with another guy from the Seattle area (Bellevue).

I have been operating on about five hours of sleep each night for the last several days so I came home and took a nap while others were doing their homework.

I’m awake again and now it’s time for me to do my homework.

Getting Closer

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It is repeated over and over in regard to hunting.  “Get closer”.

It’s an often misunderstood term.  I once was criticized for telling a guy to get closer.  He hunts on beanfields, or cornfields, that are as flat as flat gets, for as far as the eye can see.  He was quite sarcastic about it.  “Get closer.  Are you kidding?  Ever try to sneak up on a deer?”

Well yes, and it can be done if you’re willing to move slow enough and you’re downwind, but that’s not the point.

No, Young Grasshopper.  Find out where they’re going to be, and get yourself in there beforehand.  See?  You’re not “getting closer” in the real time, active stalking sense necessarily.  You’re allowing your prey to get closer to you.  You know them, you know their habits, their needs, their wants, and their hangouts and that allows you to predict their movements.

The longest shot I’ve taken at a living creature was about 85 yards, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been in the middle of 100 square miles of open flat land or in the wooded hills bordering the Palouse.  If you can observe their habits over time, you’re good to go.  Most of my kill shots were in the 15 to 45 yard range, and the closest deer were oblivious right up the moment of impact. (In Joe’s world, “closer” is anything inside 1,000 yards)

If you want to take all this as metaphor, that’s your business.  It applies in many fields anyway.

Velocity

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As kids, we liked to shoot, and one of the things we liked to shoot was cans.  Bottles were cool too, but we mostly did that at the dump since it sprays broken glass all over the place.  One of the first cans I shot was with .22 Shorts (very low power ammunition) from a handgun.  One bullet entered a can at a tangent and spun several times around the inside (“PZzzzzit!”) making the can levitate off the ground a little and leaving raised ridges protruding around the outside of the steel.  Fascinating.  That was in the 1960s.

So of course when I recently got some good performing loads worked up for a 30-30 Winchester carbine model of 1894, I was going to shoot some cans.  It’s the natural order of things.

The two milk cans below (both were filled with water) were shot using the same 170 grain bullet cast from #2 lead alloy, from the same carbine at the same distance.  The only difference was the powder charge.  The can in the first photo was hit at around 1600 feet per second, with the bullet coming in from the left and exiting to the right.  Note that the entry side is blown out much more than the exit (a not uncommon phenomenon when you have a harder outer shell containing a softer, more fluid material).  You can see that the neat little bullet entry hole is split in half.

The can below was hit at around 2000 fps, again with the bullet coming in from the left and exiting to the right.  It’s more like a cherry bomb went off inside it.  The top separated and flew waaaay up into the air.  I never did find it.

Yes it’s a little bit childish, and yes it is a lot of fun.  Though I’ve done this sort of thing hundreds of times and I’ve had this carbine since the mid ’90s, just the other day I found myself chuckling like a ten year old boy with a new toy.  It’s hard to explain.  Several previous outings were for the purpose of recording velocities, accuracy and sight adjustments for various loads.  That may be some fun, but it resembles work too.  This time out, just for shooting, was very different– more like a meditative state of near total concentration and peace.  Would that we could spend most of our lives in that state.

In case you’re wondering; I doubt there was any significant bullet expansion.  The hard cast round nose bullets were not recovered, but at those low velocities (for a rifle) I’d bet they held their shape fairly well.  I plan to try recovering some later, using several water jugs as a trap.  So we’ll see.

Winning

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Via email from Stan E. is this video news report about a woman’s shooting league.

We offer the enabling of self reliance and determination.

What do the anti-gun people have to offer in response? Just dependency and victimhood.

Is it any wonder they are losing?

CBS segment on Glock

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Via email from author Paul Barrett:

This Sunday, the newsmagazine “CBS Sunday Morning” will air an extended segment on Glock — the pistol, the company, and the man behind them — based in part on my new book, GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun (www.glockthebook.com). Anthony Mason, CBS’s Senior Correspondent for Business and Economics, reported the piece. He attended SHOT Show, did some shooting with a Glock, and interviewed me. How do you think the network will handle the issue?

We shall see Sunday morning!

All best,
Paul Barrett

My guess is the anti-gun people (all 10 of them) will be more unhappy than the pro-gun people.

Shiny

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I put some brass in the tumbler in the garage in Idaho to clean and forgot to turn it off. I then went back to the Seattle area. When I got back to Idaho nearly two weeks later the brass was very shiny:

This isn’t the first time I have forgot to turn off the tumbler. But I have never let it run for 13 days before.

Media invite for Boomershoot 2012

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Share with your media contacts:

Boomershoot.org Media Invite: Intro to Explosives Magazine
by: robosapien1010

For more information see Boomershoot.

Don’t be stupid

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If you are going to be making explosives PLEASE don’t do it some place stupid—like your office at work:

A 50-year-old Lorain County man was jailed for arson on Saturday for an explosion that injured him in his Elyria office on Friday.

Police said Robert Shaw of LaGrange was mixing chemicals to build exploding targets for firearm target practice when one blew up around 9 a.m. in the office at Diamond Products on Prospect Avenue.

Go to some open space where an accident doesn’t injure others or their property. If you don’t you can spoil the fun for the rest of us who don’t have an interest in acquiring Darwin Awards.

Via email from Bubblehead Les.

On the seventh day

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If you follow my Tweets you will know that I submitted a Windows Phone 7 application on February 25th. In my Tweet I asked, “Does anyone know how long it takes for it be certified and published?”

No one responded.

Yesterday I asked a guy at work who had gone through the process. “About 60 days” was his response. But then he explained it was a very special case that involved getting special permission, blah, blah, blah…

I dug deeper into Microsoft App Hub and found:

Certification takes an average of five business days. If it has been longer than seven days to complete Certification, contact Support from the e-Form from your account Dashboard.

Today, just a few hours from it being a full seven days, I received an email telling me the app had been published.

Still it doesn’t show up in the market place. After some more searching I found (on the same page as the previous quote):

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the app to show up in the catalog.

So my work is finished and now I must wait a day.

And so on the seventh day it was finished and it was very good. And on the seventh day I rested.

So here is a direct link to “As the Crow Flies”. It isn’t currently active but will be within 24 hours.

This is a very simple app that measures the great circle distance between any two points on the surface of the earth using Bing Maps with aerial photography. The points could be your office and that beach in the Bahamas. It could be the opposite sides of the Space Needle. It could be the distance from your shooting position to that cardboard box filled with explosives on the hillside.

Update 3/5/2012 4:24 AM: The link to the app above now works but searching in the marketplace still does not.

Update 3/5/2012 6:45 AM: The app is fully active in the marketplace now.

Winning public opinion

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This is something I wrote for the gun email list at work. Most of the people on the list live in California so I slanted it a little bit in that direction but I think it has application for a much broader audience.

I realize the situation is much different in California than in the states I spend most of my time (Washington and Idaho) but we are winning. We have been winning a bunch of court battles. We have been winning some political victories (carry in National Parks and in checked bags on Amtrak, carry in 49 states, fines for cities and elected officials in Florida who violate state preemption, etc. etc.). The anti-gun organizations are in financial trouble. And probably most importantly we are winning public opinion (see the most recent Gallup poll on guns).

As much progress as we have made elsewhere California and a few other states are still are a cancer that can spread if not treated. Don’t think that those of us in the free(er) states are unaware of the importance of these trouble spots or that we are neglecting the situation. And we are making progress in California. As you folks are probably even better aware than I SAF and CalGuns are making progress in the courts. I’ve spent a lot of time with Alan Gottlieb and Alan Gura and I am convinced they are more than competent and have plans that have a reasonable chance of success.

The blogosphere is also doing what it can to change things in California. Through the cooperation of Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned I was interviewed by a reporter for the Los Angeles Times yesterday. I was a bit apprehensive as the LA Times has been far from friendly to gun owners in the past. This report was fair and did not take advantage of some things I said which could have sounded poorly out of context. Although she didn’t mention it in the article her mother has even been to Front Sight!

I suspect California gun owners can make a difference by “coming out of the closet” now. I understand the risks but the rewards can be significant if done correctly.

One thing I would like to suggest is that gun owners/clubs reach out to traditional media. Boomershoot has had some remarkably good coverage (the KING5 Evening Magazine video on Boomershoot was even nominated for an Emmy). Boomershoot has some draw and some PR talent (not me) that most gun organizations can’t take advantage of but they can help gain public acceptance of gun owners without too much effort.

Find local news outlets that have a local events sections and get your IPDA/USPSA/Cowboy-Action/Steel-Challenge/Bowling-Pin/Bulleye/High-Power/whatever match listed. After the match write up a story (my PR person says, somewhat cynically, “Reporters are lazy. If you want their support do their work for them.”) about the match results and send it to the local news organizations. If you have something a little different you might even get them to send a reporter. Cowboy Action frequently qualifies as “different” enough. Action Pistol (IPDA/USPSA) matches provide an opportunity for this as well. I created stages for a USPSA match that addressed a visit by Fred Phelps to the area and made it into the local newspaper and the AP. That led to an interview for an article in the Seattle Times. A YouTube video of a Gabby Giffords themed concealed carry side match to a USPSA match generated nearly 8000 views and the rage of anti-gun groups and even got the attention of a Brady Campaign Board member who said, “These folks could have just sat back and shut up.”

If a news article has errors about guns (.357 caliber Glocks and 40mm handguns are my favorites) contact the reporter. Ask if they would like to attend a “media day”. Invite a number of media organizations and if you get a decent response set up a ½ day class (Keep it short! They won’t want to invest a whole day) to teach them the basics of gun types, gun vocabulary, gun myths, and gun safety. Print and bind some nice copies of the NSSF writers guide to give them (NSSF may have some for sale or distribution, you might check with them before printing your own). Include some range time with a .22 with options for larger calibers for those that are interested.

Carefully select your media guides. Good looking professionals of both sexes and various ethnic backgrounds will help dispel the stereotypes they may have of gun owners. Train your people! Prepare them for loaded questions. When media is expected at Boomershoot we have designated media contacts and since our people are spread all over the country do training via email discussions. We have a media guide FAQ (with our own inside humor) to help prepare our people. And except for those in the media who we know are gun friendly (I.E. Michael Bane of Shooting Gallery) we have a media guide with them at all times. We successfully handled a Newsweek reporter who, as near as we could determine, exclusively reported on terrorism, both international and domestic.

If you decide to head down this path let me know if I can help. My Boomershoot PR person currently has some health issues that sometimes prevent timely responses but if anyone thinks they could benefit from some help I will be glad to share what I have learned and pass on the tougher problems to an expert.

MSNBC and machine guns

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There are not many news outlets more hostile to gun ownership than MSNBC.

Or at least that is the way it used to be. Here we have an article in MSNBC telling us how much fun you can have with machine guns in Las Vegas:

You may want to set your sights on Las Vegas’ newest attraction, Machine Guns Vegas (MGV), which opened its doors Monday. Part gun range, part ultra-lounge, MGV invites visitors to grab the automatic weapon of their choice — Uzis, AK-47s and more — and get in touch with their inner gangster or SEAL Team Six commando.

“You’d be amazed at the number of people who come to Vegas and want to shoot a machine gun,” said co-owner Genghis Cohen. “It’s an experience you can’t have in a lot of places in the world.”

Gun ranges, of course, are nothing new but MGV puts a decidedly Sin City spin on the concept, a reflection, in part, of Cohen’s background in the city’s nightlife industry. He originally came to Las Vegas from his native New Zealand to open Tabu, the über-hip lounge in the MGM Grand.

MGV takes a similarly stylish approach, albeit an alcohol-free one, complete with leather furniture, hardwood floors and a bevy of “Gun Girls” led by model and U.S. Air Force veteran Jeannie Duffy.

I’m a little concerned the “Gun Girls” have the potential to reduce acceptance by women. But while she is quite attractive at least the picture of Duffy doesn’t show an excessive amount of skin or promise jiggle with the machine gun recoil:

MachineGunVegasJennieDuff

Using a .45 to discipline your teenage daughter

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Want to get your teenage daughter to not disobey ever again? Try using a .45:

I’ll bet that got her attention. It got the attention of the world with 3.7 million views in three days.

I want one

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I have the software for this. I just don’t have a way of integrating it with the proper hardware. It sounds really nice:

The next generation of battlefield optics will empower infantrymen to hit enemy targets from twice the effective range of the M4 carbine if Defense Department scientists get their way.

This summer, officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are scheduled to begin testing prototypes of the Dynamic Image Gunsight Optic, known as “DInGO.”

…

Currently, the device weighs about a pound and is approximately five inches long, three inches wide and three inches high, Wojnar said. It has a digital micro display that originated in the cell phone industry.

I know there are similar devices on the market now but the ones I have seen are larger and more appropriate for the .50 BMG or at least a .30 caliber rifle. Something small and compact for an AR-15 class rifle would be nice.

H/T to reader Richard R.

Quote of the day—Matthew Quigley

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I said I never had much use for one. Never said I didn’t know how to use it.

Matthew Quigley:
From the movie Quigley Down Under after Quigley uses a handgun for the first time in the movie with surprising results.
[This is my all time favorite movie. And this is probably the best line in the movie. As both a long range rifle shooter and a pretty good pistol shooter I really, really relate to this movie.

Then there is the the thing about a co-worker watching the movie after my recommendation and he said, “I know why you like that movie. It’s because you are Quigley.” That’s overstating things some. But perhaps not so much that I can’t see a little bit of truth in it.—Joe]

Problem with Open Carry

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Someone I know carries a Vz. 52 pistol OWB.  It hangs out in the open almost all of the time.  After several days of wet weather, the pistol was rusted.  Oops.  It looked horrific (sorry – no pictures).  Rust on the barrel, between the recoil spring and barrel especially, and rust on the outside where it contacted the holster.  Even some of the cartridges had rust on them from the magazines.  After taking it down, almost to the last pin and the last screw, it cleaned up very well.  Nothing serious this time. I’m sure the piece would have functioned, though metal oxides can be extremely abrasive.  It could get really bad if left in the holster for a longer time.

Be careful out there if you OC.  My pistol is almost always covered at least by a shirt and I’ve never seen signs of rust on it, so I’ve never thought much about it.  I have left a Winchester carbine in the vehicle for weeks at a time, and in very cold weather condensation can get between the metal and the gun case interior, causing rust at all the contact points.  So you have to take extra care.  The Parkerizing on the Colt seems to handle it much better, and the annodizing of course is already a hard metal oxide, but you want to be checking these things.

School Shooting Season

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This time of year our school shooting team gets together, I bring several guns into our local school and teach the kids how best to participate in school shootings.  This year I had 15 boys and girls in class – a pretty good percentage of the total enrollment in our small town high school.

As part of the class, which consists in large part of excerpts from the NRA Basic Home Firearm Safety course, I ask them to state some of the various reasons one might own firearms.  One of the girls chimed in with, “Space alien invasion?!”

I like these kids.  I didn’t bother to point out that their puny, crude, chemically powered kinetic energy weapons would be no match for the phase modulated space-time disrupters of the enemy.

Earlier, I had asked my daughter if she planned to join the trap shooting team this year, but she declined.  After last night’s class, she asked me how it went, and now I get the impression that she is having second thoughts;  “But I can’t shoot well enough.”
“Well, you know I can teach you, and you’ll be as good as most of the others after one day…”
“But now it’s too late.”  Which it is– they need to have already passed their hunter safety class.

So next year I figure she’ll be right in there.  We’ll see.  Several of her friends are already avid participants in mass school shootings (some of the meets involve well over a hundred shooters, from several school districts).  I bet you don’t see those trap meets covered in your local news station sports reports, do you?

ETA; The kids seemed to respond well to the variation; “Keep your booger hook off the bang switch”.  I associate it with Uncle, but I don’t know for sure where it originated.

Standard Deviation = 1

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Never heard of it, though mnaybe y’all are getting it all the time and haven’t told me.  The first time I thought is was a fluke.  20 shots from a G20 pistol with SD of one foot per second.  During the string I thought something was wrong with the chrono, because shot after shot it displayed the same number.  Then there’s the saying; if you test your velocity once, you’ll know it.  If you test it a second time, you’ll never be sure again.  Though I never got any error readings, I discarded the data.

So I went out a second time on Saturday with the same load.  The CED chrono was unwilling to get any readings from the 30-30 loads I really wanted to test.  It’s like that sometimes, even with the IR LED screens.  But it took readings from the slower, bigger 10 mm bullets just fine.  I only measured ten shots this time, so a SD is of little meaning, but the extreme spread was 6.  It might correlate to a SD of 1.  I don’t know about anyone else, and the ammo manufacturers rarely say anything about it, but I’ve thought I was doing pretty well in the past if the SD was 12 or so.

This is a light load for the ten, getting barely under 1100 fps.  More like a 40 S&W.  It’s 9.6 gr. Blue Dot (checked against a check weight) with new Starline cases, 180 XTPs and a CCI 300, just going by the dimensions in the Hornady manual.  Nothing special.  This was my starting load, but it may end up a keeper.  We’ll see.  At the moment it’s my carry load, with 43 rounds on board.

I know – handloaded ammo for self defense, blah blah.  Don’t care.  I can practice a lot more with this stuff because I can afford a lot of it, and practicing with the same load you carry makes sense.  That’s what I’ll tell the lawyers– I can shoot this load more accurately and therefore more safely, etc., because it’s exactly what I use for practice.  I tried some of the hot Double Tap 200 grain FMJ stuff.  It’s affordable for practice, and while I’m sure it’s fine ammo for some guns, my Glock did something with it that it’s never done before.  The fired case would stick in the chamber (that’s what you call a pressure sign, right there) the extractor would strip off over the case head, and a fresh round would feed into the back of the fired case.  Yikes that’s some hot stuff, but no thanks.  Two stoppages or so per magazine is more than a deal killer.  If your 10 mm can cycle it properly, it would make a good deep penetrator though.

The crimp has to be a touch under the case diameter just below the crimp though, whereas I went with “about equal”.  A couple of these XTP handloads (2 of about 150) did fail to lock up all the way – something else that’s never happened with this gun.  I’m sure it’s the crimp, and maybe that I need a new slide spring as this one is the original from the early 1990s and has been cycled umpteen thousand times.  A gentle “forward assist” on the back of the slide was all it took.  Yes; more crimp.

I’m surprised

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The Washington Post, notoriously anti-gun, published a book review written by Mark A. Keefe IV — editor in chief of American Rifleman. The book reviewed is Glock: The Rise of America’s Gunby Paul Barrett. The review was quite positive without even a hint of anti-gun sentiment between the lines.

It is a good book (my review is here). But in the Washington Post?

Wow!