Joanne Mitchell@joannemsv Tweeted on July 29, 2015 [If she really believed this she wouldn’t defend her child against a predator intent on eating it. And what is her definition of “animal life”? Does it include parasites such as leeches and tapeworms? Does she wash her fresh fruit and vegetables before eating them? Does she carefully sweep the path ahead of her so she doesn’t step on any insects?
Sometimes you just have to shake your head and walk away. Someone this mind boggling stupid isn’t even worth arguing with.
One would have thought this sort of mindset would have been hardwired out of existence a million years ago. It certainly doesn’t exist in the wild. What sort of mental illness creates someone so ill adapted to reality?—Joe]
Hunting is a coward’s pastime. If, as has been reported, this dentist and his guides lured Cecil out of the park with food so as to shoot him on private property, because shooting him in the park would have been illegal, he needs to be extradited, charged, and, preferably, hanged.
Ingrid Newkirk PETA President July 29, 2015 PETA Wants Lion-Hunting Dentist Killed [This is what they think of hunters. If they think this of hunters then don’t think for an instant that the guns hunters use are safe from them if they gain enough political power.—Joe]
Alder wood with Laurel Mountain Forge Cherry stain. The alder sucks up a ton of the stain, darkening it to a deep, deep maroon/black cherry color. The wood also soaks up the Watco Danish oil finish like crazy. The photo is after the first application, and it will take several more to achieve a good seal and a semi-gloss or high satin glow.
For handguns. Apparently it’s “not an NFA item” because it doesn’t actually attach to the handgun. SO if you duct tape it…
It seems like an OK idea on the surface. Some will of course say that if you “learn to shoot” you won’t need it, that you should be able to get the gun’s inherent accuracy, or near to it, in practice without that kind of support. That’s a nice theory I suppose.
My problem with it would be that the sights are now that much closer and I already have a hard time focusing on the front one as it is unless I’m wearing special corrective lenses or looking through a small aperture. So now I’d need a Glock with a peep sight, which would suck when used at arms length. That or a reflex sight. Or one of those pasty apertures you can stick on your glasses.
I received an email today with a discount code (5% off) for certain gun safes. The code is “FatMarble4u” and is valid for the “Fatboy Jr.” safes in burgundy and grey marble at gunsafes.com.
The prices on their website include shipping, or as they put it, “free shipping”.
But don’t grab a weapon, not even pepper spray! “They all sound like a good idea, but again, we don’t know how the burglar will react to seeing an armed person.” No, but we can probably predict how he will react to the impact of 1.25 ounces of 00 buck.
We weren’t in the mood for an all day adventure so we found a hike that was less than 10 miles away from home and less than three miles round trip with little elevation gain. We ended up selecting Around the Lake Trail.
Lakes are generally nice so there would be a view better than just the trail and the woods, right? Well… generally that is true. But this hiked ended up being, in the words of Barb, “notably non-memorable.”
It wasn’t bad in any way. It just wasn’t anything great.
One of the main attractions of this hike was a short branch of the trail called “Bus Trail”. This was the bus. I suspect its history is less interesting than all the bullet holes might suggest.
I’ve seen bigger and nicer ponds than this lake.
I’m sorry. This doesn’t qualify as a “lake”. This is a wet spot which should be drained and made into a meadow.
A fair amount of the trail was close to being a sidewalk.
Then there was the section of the trail that is fenced in.
This might be fun for kids of the appropriate age but we didn’t bother to check it out.
We did have fun with a short game of “Where’s Barb?”
There was some scenery that was pleasurable to look at and it was certainly better than a walk around the neighborhood.
USPSA matches frequently have stages which can be shot many different ways. It’s a thinking game almost as much as a shooting game. What is the best way to shoot this stage? And the best way depends on the shooter. Can they easily make long distance shots? Can they run and stop quickly? Can they shoot better over or under obstacles?
One of my biases has always been to run to a set of targets and shoot them from close up rather than shoot from a distance. I consume time running but I can shoot a lot faster and get better hits when I am close to the targets. But there is a tradeoff. If there is only one target then almost always it is going to be better to take your time and make one or two carefully aimed shots rather than run 50 (or more!) feet to hit a full sized USPSA target. So how do you know when you should run and when you should just shoot?
I’ve always just sort of guessed and sometimes had dramatically great results. So much so that I have had better scores than Master class shooters and the shooters who followed me would shoot it “my way” rather than the way others had been shooting it before me.
But how can one know which is the better way, without shooting the stage both ways, rather than relying on intuition? I decided to do some tests. I reserved a bay at the local indoor gun range and placed a bunch of USPSA targets at the end of the range. I then moved back various distances and tried shooting the targets various ways.
In each test I shot carefully enough to get all A-zone hits.
At 15 yards I found I could run to about one yard away from the targets and then get a single shot on the first target in about 3.5 seconds. The second shot on a target required about 0.20 seconds. As I moved parallel to the target line the transition to each new target required 0.40 seconds. From 20 yards the run time was about 4.4 seconds with, of course, the same splits on the targets as I moved parallel to the target line.
From a low ready position at 15 yards it took me about 1.3 seconds for the first shot with splits of about 0.55 seconds regardless of whether it was the same or a different target. From 20 yards it was about the same acquisition time for the first target but with splits of about 0.95 seconds.
I also tried shooting at the same time I moved toward the targets. This took much longer than either of the other methods.
From this information I made a spreadsheet that allowed me to explore the decision as to run and shoot or just shoot. The results surprised me. I expected that at greater distances it would be require more targets to make it more worthwhile to just stand and shoot rather than just shoot. But that wasn’t the case.
At 15 yards I should run and shoot if there are five or more targets. Otherwise I should just stand and shoot. At 20 yards I should run and shoot if there are only three or more targets.
It turns out the time to run goes up linearly with the distance but the additional split time (compared to shooting from one yard away) goes up at a faster rate. I was going to extrapolate from these two data points to different ranges but with the split time varying in a non-linear fashion I need more data to be able to do a proper extrapolation.
On Monday evening I received an email saying the normal match was canceled. No reason given. On Tuesday morning I got another email saying “Change of plans…The Steel Match is back on for this Saturday the 25th.”
It was a cool and cloudy day and sort of dreary but I have never been on a ferry ride that I didn’t like:
Chatting with people before the match I found out the reason for the cancellation was because the weather forecast was for rain. The reason for having the match anyway was because a couple people sent email saying they wanted to have the match anyway. It was sprinkling a little bit before the match. During the match only a few drops came down but we didn’t get wet.
We suspected the questionable weather was the reason for there being only eight people who showed up. With only eight people we just ran one squad and had more time to socialize during the match than usual.
The stages weren’t quite as interesting as they have been sometimes but there was a good variety. As is usual for this match they use a yellow stop plate:
In most of the pictures if you look closely enough (click on the picture for a higher resolution photo), you can see the tennis ball used for the aiming point for starting if you aren’t using a holster. No one uses a holster for rimfire guns and combined with the lower recoil the rimfire people turn in some really great times.
That last stage is very similar to the stage we called “Drag Race” at the March 28th match:
The stage yesterday was a little slower than back in March because of the position of the stop plate but I still did well on it. Some people were impressed with one string in particular which, IIRC, using my STI in .40 S&W, I completed in 2.93 seconds with 1.59 seconds used for the draw and first shot. I know it was below three seconds because Jeff said that was the time he wanted to beat. He came very close. He had one string of, IIRC, 3.08 seconds. And one of 3.15 which included a miss, and a makeup shot, on the stop plate. If he had not missed it would have been 2.75 seconds. Also of note is that all the other centerfire shooters were using 9mm which has a lower recoil but I do fine with the .40.
To me, even though I can repeatedly do it, it’s almost unbelievable to be able to draw and shoot five targets of that size, at that distance, in about three seconds. After consuming 1.5 seconds on the draw and first shot the split times between the other shots average a third of second.
Both my guns ran perfectly and although I had a few misses things went well.
the way I think is let people keep their hunting rifles….there is a need for them (I don’t think there is personally) but make it illegal to own hand guns whose only purpose is to kill people. the military can keep what they want….I hate guns of any kind
Gun control wouldn’t even work in a utopia… and I don’t know of any utopias that exist.
Primal Zen June 30, 2015 Comment to Survey: Majority of Americans Not Interested in Gun Control for 2016 [Well… if your utopia is a place where there are no animals capable of making tools I suppose you could say it works. But only because all the tool making animals are extinct rather than you banned firearms.
In essence, liberal thinking is immature thinking believing that what sounds good is good regardless of results. This is what becomes their “Law of Unexpected Consequences,” which is only unexpected to them and not to those who think things through. It is the foundation of their argument that the results of their policies are not what is to be judged, but only their good intentions. Unfortunately, the Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.
My anti-gun-rights friends — you don’t seem to understand that crimes and atrocities committed by madmen are not valid grounds for infringing on the public’s right to arms — a fundamental freedom. This is why you meet the constant resistance that befuddles and frustrates you.
…
This is why you meet all the indignant furor and nothing gets done. This is why, from the man currently in the White House to the woman who wants that seat and those who support their anti-rights position, you’re looked down upon. This is why, when you’re literally dancing in the blood of helpless innocent victims, cut down in their prime, you are scorned.
From that insensitive immoral place you come after me and my fellow decent upstanding Americans, with a self-righteous, but more importantly dangerous intention of disarming everyone who didn’t do anything. You don’t need gun control, you need help.
I’ve had a couple threesomes in my life. And I was like, Okay, let’s try more. One time I did have four girls and just myself, and that was absolutely too much. I was totally out of my league. It was just not that fun. It was a nightmare, actually. It was too much going on. You’re doing, like, a puppet show. You’re trying to take care of too many girls at once and there’s one of you.
This is one area where women overshadow men by an order of magnitude or more (see the last quote in that post). I sometimes wonder if this is part of the reason why many cultures repress female sexuality. Could it be men are envious of women and would rather repress women than suffer the envy?—Joe]
Frequently the media throws around words in a hushed tone about the things they are reporting as thought they were impressive. “Arsenal” is one of those words that normally draws an eye-roll from any sort of serious gunny, along with a derisive comment about it being less than they took to the range last week.
I participated in a USPSA match on Sunday. It was the largest local match I have ever participated in. Originally they told us 97 people were attending but the results only show 92 so maybe some people left without shooting. That would be entirely understandable. It was a hot day for the Seattle area. It was 97 F when I left. The sweat was dripping off of me most of the time and I consumed two liters of water without once using the bathroom. Including my travel and registration time I spent 10 hours participating. It’s a good thing it was fun.
Marysville Rifle Club has stages that are more complex and challenging than those I have found at any other club. Don’t fool yourself into even thinking for even a millisecond these are anything like real life scenarios. They are problems to be solved using gun skills and your ability to move. It’s a game and this match demonstrated it better than any other match I have attended.
Here is an example:
Where, in real life, might you find something that looks like this?
Other stages were difficult because there were targets which were hard to find even when you weren’t on the clock. I, as well as many others, overlooked one target because of this and got a lot of penalties for it.
One stage required us to run about 60 feet then shoot a bunch of targets. I ran, shot targets, started to move to the next set of targets and reached for one of my four spare magazines on my belt. Three of them were gone. My stopping at the first set of targets caused the magazines to fall out of their holsters. This was a 30 round stage and I had just dropped one of my two remaining magazines that still had ammo in it. I had planned to do another reload when I moved between target arrays again. The magazine that remained was my one special magazine. It has a special follower that allows it to hold 19 rounds of .40 S&W. Along with the “super powers” the follower has a flaw. It doesn’t lock back the slide when the gun is empty. For this reason I don’t normally use it but it gave me 20 rounds in the gun and I decided to continue on without going back to look for the missing magazines or pick up the one I just dropped from the gun. I finished the stage with one round to spare.
An unusual thing did happened on a couple stages which can be blamed on the polymer coated lead bullets. They produce a lot of smoke. When shooting targets in deep shadows while the gun is in the bright sunlight the targets would sometimes nearly disappear in the smoke after a couple shots. The smoke reflected the sunlight creating a bright cloud between me and the targets.
As interesting as the previous stages were they weren’t the “best” one. Check this one out:
See the Texas Star on the right? Here is someone shooting one the conventional way:
In our case we had two Texas Stars. One on each side of the barricade. We also started the stage over 100 feet away and had to shoot 11 other targets on the way to the barricade.
It turns out that barricade has a special name. It’s called a Rhodesian Wall. The 1996 January/February issue of Front Sight, the USPSA magazine, had this to say about Rhodesian Walls:
With a Rhodesian Wall, which is not commonly used any more, the shooting position is a raised box behind a wall with a stout rope hanging down the middle. The problem is that the wall is so wide that you can’t shoot around it except by holding onto the rope with one hand, leaning around the edge and shooting one-handed while keeping the feet on the box.
Here is one of the participants in Sunday’s match practicing on the wall:
Yes. You had to shoot small moving targets one handed, around both sides of a barricade, while dangling from a rope, after running over 100 feet.
I have never seen such a difficult stage before. Many people in our squad ran out of ammo before hitting all the plates on the Texas Stars. One guy left three plates on one star and hadn’t even shot at the other one. With misses like that you end up getting a zero on the stage. There were stage times approaching 200 seconds. And I saw one guy get disqualified for breaking the 180 on this stage.
Fortunately last Thursday I went to the range and practiced my one handed shooting. I did well on this stage completing it in 42.12 seconds (an average of 1.316 seconds per shot) with no misses. I had good hits on the paper and got 154 points. The Grandmaster shooters in Limited came in with times of 32.80, 36.83, and 39.48 seconds with points in the range of 150 to 152. This put me at 7th out of 33 in Limited Division and 13th out of 92 overall.
That was my high point of the match. I also did decent on the classifier for a change. I might actually get my classification back up into the B range with that stage.
The worst stage was where I overlooked the target and had a miss on another target racking up 40 points in penalties.
Overall I was pleased with the results. My gun ran perfectly. But the fiber optic front sight insert did disappear sometime along the way, I think it might have been on the Rhodesian Wall stage. It is very fragile and I had to shoot through a port there (as well as several other stages) and it is easy to bump it on the edges of the port. But the irons were still fine and I didn’t really miss it.
