Quote of the day—clam_dude

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I understand that in the context we live, in which there are many criminals with guns, it may be unfair to stop people from owning them legally.  But this is because of the problem of having too many guns in the first place.  It seems to me that we should try to find some way of decreasing, over time, the number of guns floating around out there.

Or perhaps the best solution would be to limit the number of bullets produced and make them more expensive. 

But I think something needs to be done in the direction of less guns as opposed to more.  Can we agree that in the long run this will lead to less gun deaths?

clam_dude
May 13, 2015
A thought on gun control
[They “dude” is incredibly naïve, simpleminded, or went on a magic mushroom trip and never made it all the way back.

Decreasing “the number of guns floating around out there”? And how would he suggest someone do that? Forbid the manufacture of them then going door to door and asking nicely? I don’t think you have a clue how that might turn out. A reduction in “gun deaths” would not be what history would record for that little exercise.

And the same thing with the ammunition supply.

If this “Einstein” thinks any of his ideas would work then why not try them with recreational drugs and see how that works out. Oh! That’s right. They have tried those sort of things are. Any high school drop out can get whatever recreation drug they want within an hour or two, 24x7x365.

So the answer to his question is, “No!” Now shut up. The adults are talking.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dan Gross

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This is a huge victory that will save lives in Oregon by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people who will no longer be able to exploit the vast ‘Internet loophole’ to buy guns for cash in back alleys without a Brady background check. Lives will be saved as a result.

Dan Gross
President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
May 11, 2015
Oregon Governor Signs Bill to Expand Background Checks
[I know this is a lie. You know this is a lie. The CDC knows this is a lie. And Dan Gross knows this is a lie.

How do I know that Gross knows this is a lie? Look at the careful wording of their media release:

The Brady Campaign recently released a report highlighting the success of the Brady Law, while making the case for why Oregon needs to expand Brady background checks to all gun sales. The report shows that Brady background checks work, and that expanding them in Oregon will save lives. In 2013, Brady background checks blocked 2,215 prohibited sales in Oregon; an average of six every day.

Here they measure success by the number of sales blocked. Not the number of lives saved. If they blocked all sales they would claim an even greater success.

They go on to say:

States with expanded Brady background checks see 46 percent fewer women murdered with guns by intimate partners; 48 percent fewer law enforcement officers killed by guns; and 48 percent fewer gun-related suicides, according to a recent report by Everytown for Gun Safety.

Here they measure success by reduction in the number of people murdered or committed suicide with guns. They don’t tell you if the total number of people murdered or committed suicide went down or perhaps went up. They don’t want to talk about violent crime rates. They only to talk about “gun deaths”.

There is a reason for that. They know that gun control does not save lives. They have a cultural of lies and deception. And whatever their motivation is for advocating gun control they are willing to lie to advance their agenda.—Joe]

Speaking of stupid

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How can they think this makes sense?

In the swirling controversy of the tragic death of New York City Police Office Brian Moore who was shot last week in Queens, the gun used to take his life has been tied to a pawn shop burglary that occurred in Perry, Georgia in 2011. The incident has Georgia, and many other states, under intense scrutiny for their gun laws and ATF oversight.

A NYC police officer was shot with a stolen gun from Georgia four years ago and people blame the gun laws in Georgia for the shooting. What gun laws do they think would have made a difference?

Senator Chuck Schumer is not a stupid guy, yet:

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer has since asked the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to expand their firearm trace program.

The gun was stolen! How does he expect the ATF to trace a stolen gun? He has to believe the general population has crap for brains.

Quote of the day—RickR

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The gun lobby never lets stupid get in the way of their goals.

RickR
May 11, 2015
Tories push gun control changes through Parliament
[I find it very telling that RickR used fabricated data before claiming the gun lobby attempts stupid goals.

It appears to be universal and not just in our country. An anti-gun person believes gun owners are so stupid we won’t notice and call them on how ignorant, and/or malicious, and/or stupid they are.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Don MacLeod @halcyondon

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I understand you just lurrrve yr guns. Makes the inadequate feel good. Nice culture.

Don MacLeod @halcyondon
Tweeted on May 4, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a Tweet from @BigFatDave.—Joe]

Boomershoot image caption contest

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Come up with the best caption for this image from Boomershoot 2015 in the comments and I’ll give you a free Boomershoot 2015 shirt, mug, or thong. Family and Boomershoot staff are welcome to participate but won’t be getting a free anything out of it.

My decision is autocratic, final, and may appear to be at random.

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My thoughts are as follows:

  • Impressive stick throwing from 375 yards away.
  • You’ve proven yourself with the hastily constructed spears.Now try using lead projectiles to get detonations.
  • The BC of wood projectiles is too low to retain enough velocity for reliable detonation.
  • I know reloading components have been tough to come by recently but this substitute doesn’t have much future.

Images from Boomershoot 2015

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This is my impression of Boomershoot 2015 in images and a few words.

WP_20150503_08_05_45_Pro__highresCreating a target rich environment.

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The hillside as seen through a 6X scope.

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Part of the tree line target area as seen through a 6X scope.

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Nearly all of the target areas as seen from a 1.5X scope.

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The fireball crew and their work of art. Barron doesn’t actually walk around with a road flare stuck in his ear. See more details here.

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On the left Janelle is pregnant. On the right her husband Barron just initiated the fireball.
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People inspecting the crater left by the fireball.

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Adjusting the artillery for a long distance shot.

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It wasn’t really indirect fire.

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Appropriate.

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Taking a break.

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This guy did his prep before he started shooting.

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Barb and I patrol the shooting line (photo by Kim).

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The two obvious hits are probably outside the active zone anyway. But the target is mostly empty from the rip in the lower right corner.

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You’ve got the windage down. Let’s work on elevation.

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It’s still a target rich environment at lunch time.

 

Boomershoot 2016 will be April 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. You know you want to. Start making your plans now.

Quote of the day—Ronald Reagan

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The starting point must be the Constitution, because, above all, we are a nation of laws and the foundation for our laws, or lack of same, is the Constitution. It is amazing to me how so many people pay lip service to the Constitution, yet set out to twist and distort it when it stands in the way of things they think ought to be done or laws they believe ought to be passed. It is also amazing to me how often our courts do the same thing.

Ronald Reagan
September 1975
Editorial, Guns & Ammo
[From Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.

I was struck by how closely what Ted Cruz said a couple years ago matches what Reagan said decades earlier:

For a long time, a whole bunch of Democrats and unfortunately even some Republicans have been passing laws in this body without even asking where the basis is in the Constitution, and I think the Constitution should be the starting point for everything Congress does.

I agree with the sentiment but the cancer has spread so deep into the fabric of our society that rapidly ripping out the tumors would result in massive hemorrhaging. A slow removal almost certainly result in the tumor metastasizing and changing form to embed itself even deeper and perhaps more threating to the “patient”.

I’m nearly certain there is “too fast” and “too slow”. But what is “just right”?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

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You know, I felt better about the 19th Amendment before I knew that women, given a choice, would let Hitler live.

Glenn Reynolds
April 9, 2015
THAT’S BECAUSE WE’RE GIVERS
[This arose out of a hypothetical situation where you could go back in time and kill Hitler, if you wanted to. Men were more likely than women to choose that option as opposed to letting him live.

This is very interesting to me. One could claim that men are more rational and see the benefit of killing one tyrant so that, perhaps, millions may survive. And furthermore claim women tend to see the murder of Hitler as morally wrong and are unable to see there are exceptions to the morality code against killing.

But there are lots of other ways to look at the results of the study:

  • Perhaps women tend to respect rules more than men.
  • Perhaps the social norms in this country are such that women are taught it is better to be a victim than an aggressor even against a villain.
  • Perhaps women have a greater tendency to weigh the many different possibilities and come to the conclusion that maybe it might have turned out worse had someone else come to power instead of Hitler.
  • Perhaps women have developed a tendency toward pacifism not developed by men. This would give them an evolutionary advantage by being less likely to kill their own children because the biological cost of them creating another child is much higher compared to the biological cost for a man to create another child.

This study would seem to have implications for self-defense as well.

Other thoughts?—Joe]

Irony

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Jonathan Hutson is “Chief Communications Officer at Brady Campaign & Center to Prevent Gun Violence”. Yet his Twitter account and LinkedIn profile claim an affinity for human rights and justice.

Hasn’t he gotten the message that gun ownership is a specific enumerated human right in this country? Or was he hungry enough that he took a job working for the devil?

Quote of the day—John Lott

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3-D printers mean an end to any gun control. The government is not going to be able to ban magazines for guns, or ban guns themselves, and the notions of background checks would be even more impossible to do. Anyone with access to a 3-D printer can make guns functionally and indistinguishable from a gun that can be bought in a store. I don’t know how the government will stop people from obtaining a printer.

Just look at the illegal download of television shows and movies. Millions of copies have been downloaded and the government has been unable to stop it. Why would the government be successful in stopping other information like these files from being downloaded?

John Lott
May 7, 2015
Why Gun Control is Ultimately Doomed to Fail
[Well… the government can ban magazines and guns but they can’t effectively enforce the ban. It will be incredibly obvious it is like banning alcohol in the 1920s. Or even banning sex outside of marriage. It will be trivial to supply the black market and people will mock those who attempt to support it.—Joe]

Road flares and gasoline

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The Boomershoot 2015 fireball was very well done and impressive. Here are some of the details of the construction.

There were 15 seven-inch square targets, each containing 800 grams (about 1.8 pounds) of Boomerite arranged as shown below around a 50 pound bag of powdered sugar:

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The target in the lower right with the two red dots was facing the audience and shooter. This is the initiating target which propagated the detonation to the rest of the targets.

In the picture below you see 19 gallons of the gasoline/diesel mixture in place on top of the explosives.

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The job of the explosives is to lift the gasoline and mix it in the air. Usually we have a ratio of explosives to gasoline of about 1 pounds to 2 gallons up to 1 pound to 1 gallon. This time it is about 1.4 to 1.

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In the picture above we have the people that designed and constructed the fireball (left to right: Mike, Matthew, Barron, and Ry) along with the road flares attached with rubber bands to rebar and wooden sticks. One or more of these flares ignited the fuel air mixture.

In Phil’s slow motion video below you will see the ignition start on the side opposite the shooter and propagate to the remainder of the fuel-air mixture.

In this frame capture from Ry’s video you can see the dust propelled into the air some distance from the explosion. I suspect this is from the shock wave traveling through the ground.

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In the still picture of mine below you can see pieces of shredded milk jugs which have been propelled beyond the expanding “ball” of fuel and that most of the fuel has been ignited. The flares mounted on the rebar and sticks are entirely engulfed in the fireball.

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The following pictures is one of the most interesting fireball photos I have ever seen. Usually it is mushroom shaped or even flattens out more than the picture above. But this ball of fire barely touches the ground and is a decent approximation of a sphere. I’m not sure what the white streamers coming out of the fire are. Perhaps pieces of burning milk jug or lumps of powdered sugar.

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Here, a fraction of a second later, we have the ball of fire suspended in air on what is a probably a column of water vapor from the explosives:

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Here, another fraction of a second later, we have the fuel still burning high up in the air and forming a smoke ring:IMG_2701CroppedAdjusted

Watch Ry’s video and see the fire roll around in the sky. It’s amazing:

In the picture below, less than a minute after the explosion, we have Barron standing in the middle of the crater he created. But notice there is no fire on the ground. In years past there were patches of burning fuel on the ground. There was none this year. It all went up into the air.

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Another thing, as pointed out by Ry this year and last (edited to add: Ry says the first time was 2011 or earlier), is that nearly all of the flares have been extinguished. Ry is the first person I know who has successfully extinguished road flares with gasoline.

Don’t try this at home. Come to Boomershoot 2016 instead.

Quote of the day—Cloudbuster

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There has been adequate documentation that the religious doctrines of the terrorists are accurately reflective of accepted Muslim doctrine. The accurate term for the “moderate Muslims” everyone talks about is “apostates.” Or perhaps “heretics.”

Cloudbuster
May 4, 2015
Comment to Big Edit at the New York Times
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Barrel extraction

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As I reported last month the barrel in my STI Eagle attempted to spontaneously disassemble. I couldn’t get the slide open and figured I would just put the gun on the shelf that way. But Jacob said he was interested in doing a professional metallurgical evaluation of it. So I put some effort into extracting the barrel from the gun.

First I used a punch and drove the slide stop out far enough to get a finishing nail partially under it so that it was exposed:

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Then brother Doug used an air powered cutoff tool to cut the slide stop almost in two and then pried the slide stop out:

The slide then easily came off. I then used a hammer (and other tools) to tap on the barrel to remove it from the slide.

The end result is that I was able to discover the barrel split about three fourths of its length:

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As I looked at this barrel I remembered something. That flat spot on the bottom of the barrel was not there when it came from the factory. That was machined by an STI gunsmith so that a Recoil Master would fit. This would have weakened the barrel.

Quote of the day—Barb L.

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Your pants were dirtier than any of my kids clothes ever were.

Barb L.
May 4, 2015
[Boomershoot is dirty. If it rains then it is muddy. If it is dry then it is dusty. This year it was dusty.

She put my jeans through the washer twice.

She described her shower Saturday evening as “epic” with a river of muddy water flowing down the drain.

Here is her rental car the morning after Boomershoot:

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But some people think the joy things like this brings makes it all worthwhile:

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Barron (standing in the crater from the fireball crater he created) seemed to think so:

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But that is just part of the reason of Why Boomershoot.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kim Huffman-Scott

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They are getting too fast and I couldn’t count.

Kim Huffman-Scott
Boomershoot Target Production Manager
May 2, 2015
[I put Kim in charge of target production this year. This is one of the best decisions I have ever made. It dramatically reduced my work load and stress level. But most of all she did an awesome job.

The production line is usually running for about 13 or 14 hours to produce the targets for Boomershoot. This time it was less than eight hours. Part of this was the enthusiastic “army of people” (as Barb describes it) there to help. But Kim figured out how to put them all to work and they listened to her.

Kim quickly identified bottlenecks and fixed them. This is a dynamic problem because it depends on which size targets are being produced and who is doing which job at the time. She  also would anticipate when to change the line to a new target type. This is tough because the production line may have 10 to 20 targets in various stages of completion but you only have a good count of the number of actually completed crates. The following video gives you a clue of what it was like. It doesn’t show the people outside folding the boxes.

As the production crew cranked up the production rate it became more and more difficult to get a snapshot of completed crates and targets in production. This resulted in today’s QOTD. She told me this a few minutes after I took the video above.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jintana Nanana‏@jintana

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Penises in hand “@minasmith64: Not sure what Shannon’s idea of motherhood might be but our family is raising men… pic.twitter.com/d0VZM562y4”

B54VK7RIIAAKwJz

Jintana Nanana‏@jintana
Tweeted on December 27, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a tweet from Linoge @wallsofthecity.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chuck Michel

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Police and prosecutors driven by politics or policy to seize and keep non-contraband property can always postulate about a theoretical risk that a prohibited individual might exert future control over transferred firearms. But absent evidence, theoretical speculation shouldn’t justify the forfeiture of someone’s valuable property, no matter what kind of property it is. At least when it comes to firearms, however, it seems like some lawyers or judges who perhaps don’t like guns generally feel that forfeiting them to the government is a desirable political end, justifying the use of unfounded theoretical future risk constructs as the means to expand the doctrine of constructive possession and thereby effectuate the politics of gun control.

Chuck Michel
March 12, 2015
Gun Seizure and Government Corruption
[There are many cases where the government has taken peoples guns and then refused to give them back or even let the owner sell them to someone else. This is now being challenged with moderate success in the courts but don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Hillary Clinton

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I will also work to reinstate the assault weapons ban. We had it during the 1990s.

Hillary Clinton
April 16, 2008
Democratic Debate in Philadelphia
[See also some of the other stuff she has said about your rights.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns away.—Joe]

Boomershoot 2015 status

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The first day of Boomershoot 2015 is over.

From the participants viewpoint things are going quite well. The weather is good with moderately warm temperatures, no precipitation, and no to light winds. The Boomers seem to be detonating well if there are solid hits.

From the staff viewpoint things things are pretty good. The biggest hiccup was when the first thing this morning Barb’s rented car locked the doors automatically with the keys inside along with the cash box, wristbands, and the check-in list for the Precision Rifle clinic. This was 15 minutes before people were scheduled to check in. Barb was quite upset and I was almost unable to convince her it was going to be okay. She called the rental agency who had roadside assistance out in a little over an hour and unlocked her car. I set her up with my laptop and the electronic version of the check-in list. No wrist bands and the laptop was a little more awkward than crossing people off the list with a pen, but she got through it just fine.

Another minor issue was the private fireball didn’t work the first or second time. There was a combination of problems. Some of it was improper construction and some shooter problems as well. The third attempt at a fireball was acceptable:

There were some injuries. I twisted my ankle, Barb scraped her back a little bit, and we saw some moderately bad sunburns.

For me it is difficult to see anything but the flaws but I had several people tell me how much fun they were having and how great an event it is, and what I overhear and see on their faces confirm this. This is what makes Boomershoot worthwhile to me.