What convictions? Guy’s a politician, but he hasn’t been convicted of anything. Yet. And that’s the only kind of conviction you can expect from a politician.
WeaponsMan
June 29, 2013
Beretta: Not expanding in MD, or to WV or RI
[I hadn’t thought of this before but one could say politicians attempt to avoid convictions but if they stay in the business long enough sometimes the law catches up with them.—Joe]
It happened again. Someone asked me what I thought the best caliber is. Granted they didn’t ask it quite that ambiguous. But it did raise the “insufficient information hackles” when I got the email.
The actual question was:
Tell me which caliber you think is best and why: 9mm, 40 S&W, or 45 ACP.
Had the question been, “Which caliber has the best stopping power?” I would have replied, “It’s tough to beat something chambered in 200 mm XM422 with the 40 kiloton yield option”.
The question isn’t quite that unbounded but still it’s insufficiently bounded to give an answer that is credible for even a fraction of the possible values of the unconstrained variables. One must really have more information about the use cases of the firearm before you can give an answer that someone couldn’t drive a Euclid truck through.
When someone asks a question like this what you really need to do is get the person asking the question to answer it for themselves. For all intents and purposes they already know the answer they just don’t know the proper questions to ask themselves. You can help them with this.
The top level question is, “What are you going to use this gun for? Recreation, self-defense, competition, all of the above?” One could drill down to a depth of three or more in the specifics for any of the answers given but here are few of the possibilities:
Everything is a tradeoff. The smaller calibers tend toward higher capacities, higher velocities, lower costs, and, obviously, smaller holes. With the larger calibers the opposite is true. Once you figure out your application then the caliber question should pretty much answer itself.
If you are interested in self-defense “stopping power” then I answered that question nearly 15 years ago and I don’t see any reason to update the conclusion where I agree with Greg Hamilton who says:
The entire discussion of “stopping power” is both stupid and irrelevant. Statistics cannot be applied to individuals. People that need to be shot need to be shot soon and often. They need to be shot until they run out of fluid, brains, or balls.
If during the time you were reading the latest “stopping power” article you were instead practicing to save your life you would be far, far ahead.
Greg Hamilton
May 08, 1998
Of potential interest is what caliber gun(s) do I own and use and why.
I have guns in all three of the calibers in question. I almost never use the 9mm or the .45. The reason has nothing to do with the caliber themselves. It is because a .40 with 17 or 18 round magazines is the best choice for Limited class USPSA matches which I compete in. I can compete in USPSA and Steel Challenge with it and I can carry it for self-defense. I figure the odds of me using it in self-defense are pretty low but the probability of me using it in competition are near 1.0. And even supposing that some other caliber/gun would be better for self-defense the fact that I am going to be practicing with the competition gun is probably going to make up for the (questionable) fact that I wasn’t shooting the optimal caliber.
Fade in
INT – DAY – Officers mess
Helton, Lag, Harbin, Ahmed, Capt THRIM TOKAREV (commander of the 13th Mountain Shields, late 30s, short hair, goatee, medium skinned, scarred, tough, bull-necked and broad-shouldered) sit around the table discussing strategy. On a wall screen is the planetary alignment diagram, on the table screen is a layout of the expected battlefield. Continue reading
Senator Schumer, America’s leading anti-gun legislator has just confessed that there are not enough votes to pass his universal background check bill. But what if there were? How futile is a proposal to have background check on all NEW guns sales for a nation which already has an estimated backlog of 319 million? Well, if that were adopted today, and Senator Schumer lived to be 400 years old there would still be upwards of 300 million guns for which there were no background checks.
Don B. Kates
June 11, 2013
Futile, Stupid Gun Control Proposals
[Background checks are just a first step. Schumer and everyone of any intelligence on both sides of the gun control debate know this. And most everyone knows background checks are pointless. Registration and, ultimately, confiscation are the real goals.—Joe]
Via email from Joey D.
But of course it is irrational to expect people to be rational.
And for those that are unwilling or unable to behave rationally we defend our guns with guns.
Fade in
INT – NIGHT – Tajemnica bridge.
Helton and Allonia sit, relaxed, chatting. Helton is in the command spot, Allonia is at com. Lighting is dim, background is quiet. Star diagrams and charts, systems status readouts, and a few internal passageway camera views are on the screens. One of the navigation chart diagrams suddenly starts blinking, then enlarges to take over several screens. Continue reading
How about a gun buyback program where instead of money, you get a penis enlargement? #NRA
Lalo Alcaraz (@laloalcaraz)
Tweeted on January 30, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
In my hand I have a computer with nearly the human computational power of an entire planet of people. It has proximity, light, sound, acceleration, magnetic field, and location sensors. It is in near constant contact with a network of hundreds of millions of other computers most of which are far more powerful than it. You can buy one for about a day’s pay.
With all that power, data, and sensor input available what appears one of the easiest paths to fame and fortune with it is to program it to make fart sounds*.
Both Marvin and I have good cause to be depressed.
*Ry pointed this out to me last week. “Thank you” Ry.
If an ‘armed citizenry’ is a constitutionally protected ‘deterrent’ to abuse by federal officials, this would imply that the greatest protection should be given citizens who are arming themselves against the threat of such abuse.
Dennis A. Henigan
(Former) Vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
January 28, 2008
DANCES WITH GUNS
[Yes. That is absolutely correct.
He also said he doesn’t argue that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime.
Henigan “gets” it. He doesn’t like it, but he gets it.
Perhaps this is part of the reason he quit the gun control industry.—Joe]
Next time someone says they are OK with the NSA spying because they are “keeping us safe” and “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” or some such fantasy, here’s something to consider. According to this, the most commonly crime prosecuted in the former East Germany in the five years before the unification was failure to report a crime you knew about. When the state knows everything, then NOT being a rat becomes more dangerous than being a criminal giving the police a cut of the action for protection, because you have no leverage. That thought should terrify folks when they realize what it really means.
(BTW – I think the Judge likely believes what he says when he reports that, but I do not have an independent verification of his reported fact- anyone know for sure the stats on that? Even if it’s not the number one “crime,” if it’s anywhere in the top hundred it is bad.)
(Later Edit: How big a step is it from “see something, say something” to “see something, you are required to say something” with some sort of nebulous protections that may, or may not, protect you if you do say something?)
I played with it some… took me a minute to figure out how to position the shooter/target spots on the map… but then I found the elevation tool, and… whoa, totally cool.
Top notch stuff here.
Gregory Morris
June 28, 2013
Comment to the blog post Field Ballistic about my app for Windows Phone.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Fade in
EXT – NIGHT – Deep Space
Three ships hang in the near black darkness. A supply ship, Tajemnica, and Borealis. The three are all “snuggled up” together, airlock to airlock, supply ship in the middle. In the far background, stars and the Milky Way turn lazily by, making the three ships seem insignificant. Continue reading
Interesting how the media and some of the other things are portrayed.
The overwhelming research shows that buybacks generally don’t work well and are a waste of resources and are mocked by the NRA.
Ralph Fascitelli
Washington CeaseFire President
January 2013
McGinn’s office ignored leading gun control group in buyback effort
[There you have it. A gun control group admits what we have been saying for years. Gun “buybacks” are a waste. And “overwhelming research” supports this conclusion.
H/T to Ry.—Joe]
Since I see people searching for this information and brother Doug posted it on Facebook last week (June 19th) I’m posting it here for better visibility:
The autopsy on our son Brad was performed in Pullman today. The preliminary results showed nothing. The coroner told me they did a very detailed autopsy, organ by organ and found no aneurysms, no blood clots, and no abnormalities that could explain his sudden death.
They are sending vials of body fluids to a lab for a wide range of toxicology tests, but he said nearly all toxins will leave some type of physical symptom that is noticeable in an autopsy (and they found no such tell tale signs). They have removed the electrical conduction paths from his heart and if the toxicology report comes back negative, they will examine the heart tissue with a scanning electron microscope and they might possibly find a defect in that.
Julie’s father had a defect in the routing of the nerves controlling his heart muscle. It caused him problems most of his life, but he died in his mid 70s of lung cancer. The coroner said Brad did NOT have that defect.
It will take about two weeks to get the results of the toxicology report.
Last Saturday Barb L. and I were at the Boomershoot site to “go on a daffodil rescue mission”. As I mentioned a few weeks ago there are some daffodils near the shooting line that get abused pretty badly by the fireballs.
We figured it would only take an hour or two of our time and we’d be done with the project. We dug up about a half dozen clumps of the wilted daffodils and got a five gallon bucket full of bulbs.
To get so many bulbs from so few flowers was surprising to us. Then we started digging holes in the front of the shooting berm. After we had dug about 10 holes we knew this was going to take a LOT longer than an hour or two. After about three hours we started on “Plan B” which was to just dig a ditch in front of the shooting berm to dump the bulbs into so they survive another year and we could move them again when we feel up to it. We made the length of the ditch match the width of the berm we put daffodils in. This was about 60 feet which is only about one third of the width of the berm.
After about 4.5 hours we had all the bulbs back in the ground, fertilized, and watered.
We then went to look at some luxury accommodations my brother Doug offered us for the night:
We declined this time. It was too upscale for our tastes.
We went back to Boomershoot Mecca and made our bed under the stars and the super moon without a tent so we could see the sky better:
To the northwest we could see a beautiful sunset (at 9:38 PM) (see also this sunset picture taken a few minutes earlier from a different location):
To the southeast we could see the super moon:
The glowing sphere in the field is just a friendly UFO* which was visiting.
I got better pictures of the super moon earlier in the evening when we visited the Big Eddy Marina on Dworshak Lake:
The next morning what I believe to be a Western Meadow Lark sang several songs to us. I recorded some of them and will probably make a post about that someday.
*Actually it was an internal reflection in the camera lens.
I found this surprising*. Very pleasing, but surprising:
Field Ballistics on Windows Phone is in the list of “Top paid” sports apps after being out for only a week.
See my announcement here. Purchase it (or get a free trial version) here.
*Assuming no inflation, sales remain constant, and I saved and invested every penny then in another 1000 years I might be able to retire on the proceeds.
The man is obsessed and if he’s spent so much as a dime of public money on what amounts to a private crusade, Mayor Bloomberg needs to be held accountable for that.
If Eric Schneiderman won’t investigate Bloomberg for possible misuse of public funds we will. The mayor has been acting increasingly like a self-appointed monarch, but this still the United States, not Bloomberg’s personal fiefdom.
Alan Gottlieb
June 26, 2013
SAF ASKS FOR ALL BLOOMBERG-MAIG RECORDS FROM NYC AFTER REVELATIONS
[Bloomberg is like some proslavery politician in the mid-1800’s obsessed with the “problem” that there are states that are free. He wants all states and cities to put “people in their place”.
Bloomberg needs to be put in his place and it if takes lawsuits, courts, and Federal Marshalls hauling him off to jail I’m just fine with that.—Joe]
Fade in
INT – DAY – Tajemnica mid-deck passageway, near a stairwell
Helton, looking tired, walks heavily down the stairs, and clumps down the passageway headed for the galley. He pauses and looks through a window into the cargo bay, where two formations with about one hundred young men are doing drills wearing armor and carrying shields. The formations face one another as shield walls layered four ranks deep, and they are practicing pushing forward against the other, while the other side falls back in good order on command. Shove, counter-shove, advance, fall back, bugle call, change direction, do it again. Through the open windows a crashing of metal and flesh, a grunting of men struggling to breath and keep going, corrections and encouragement from the experienced soldiers. Another short bugle call and they both fall back a few steps and then rest in place a moment. Kwon steps up next to him to watch as well. Continue reading
Fade in
EXT – DAY – Training field on New Texas
Aerial view of a vast grassy plain in full, bright sun. It looks like a really hectic Day One in a HUGE boot camp. On a large training field, there are thousands of young men in companies of a hundred or so running all sorts of speed, agility, and strength tests. Each company has a handful of guys in uniform, and they are racing individuals and teams against one another in a high-speed, highly competitive, multifaceted course selection. The guys in uniform are broad-shouldered, sold-looking, mature men with short hair and a serious look. Continue reading
