From Sean and Wendell.
Sean says, “In the spirit of Boomershoot Adventures…”
Skeet shooting has been replaced.
I’m amazed by his excellent aim shooting the shotgun from the hip and what appears to be without sights with the machine gun.
Now if those cars had been filled with Boomerite…
I’ve had several requests to blow up cars but people always lost interest when I told them they would have to help clean up the mess.
I’m working on the web page(s) for reserving a Boomershoot 2007 shooting position. You can see it here. For test purposes only at this time. Let me know what you think.
The pictures were taken March of 2006 on a rather “gray” day. During the actual event the grass is green even if it’s snowing, you have 40 MPH winds, and the forecast is looking up because they are only predicting 20 MPH winds and rain.
Actually, some times it’s beautiful (from Ry, click on the picture for the video):
Now, isn’t that beautiful? One of my favorite quotes says it so well:
I don’t know why everyone does not share my delight with explosives. If they don’t, it has to be some abhorrent character defect.
Ragnar Benson
From: Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
Page 110, Copyright 1988.
The time is overdue for a reassessment of such laws. All they have done is create target-rich, no-risk environments for monsters who have no fear of encountering an armed teacher or administrator, or a legally-armed private citizen who might happen to be in the building.
This sort of thing didn’t happen before the advent of gun-free school zone laws. You never saw such an outrage in the days when high schools typically had rifle teams, and — particularly in the West — where it was common in the fall to find both teachers and students with hunting rifles or shotguns locked in their cars.
Alan Gottlieb
Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
CO. ATTACK PROVES FALLACY OF ‘GUN FREE SCHOOL ZONE’ LAWS, SAYS CCRKBA
September 28, 2006
Actually it is a Discovery Channel piece that I was pointed to by the anti gun bigot at “Freedom State Alliance”. This time I actually mostly agree with him when he says:
This shocking video might be the best demonstration of the lethality and power of the .50-caliber sniper rifle – YOU SIMPLY MUST WATCH IT.
Drop the words “shocking” and “YOU SIMPLY MUST” and we’ve come to agreement.
There is some false/misleading information in the video however. Bolt action rifles don’t take 15 to 20 seconds to cycle. And the AK round is seldom referred to as “308”.
Liberal gun-grabbing legislation is going to go down here… . And I’m going to continue to stand with some of my colleagues and reference those hundreds of thousands of Second Amendment supporters that want the gun-grabbing legislation to go down.
Daryl Metcalfe
Pennsylvania State Representative
September 27, 2006
Mostly, a miss on gun control
The Philadelphia Enquirer September 28, 2006
[This particular gun grabbing special event attracted a lot of attention outside the state as well as inside. It’s good to see the anti-gun bigots stopped.–Joe]
The Utah Supreme court:
In the decision, the court ruled a University of Utah policy prohibiting students, faculty and staff from carrying weapons on campus violated Utah’s Uniform Firearms Act. The law, enacted in 2004, prevents any state entity from creating a rule which in “any way inhibits or restricts the possession or use of firearms on either public or private property,” according to the ruling.
So what are the schools doing?
Paul Murphy, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the policies at both Weber State and USU raise legal concerns in light of the court’s recent ruling.
“Right now, the law is very clear that only the legislature can make laws concerning firearms,” Murphy said. “And if they [state schools] are out of sync with that, they will have to make changes.”
So far, however, USU and Weber State have no plans to permanently change their gun policies.
“I haven’t heard anything on our campus about making a change to this policy [prohibiting firearms],” said Travis Hampshire, a human resources generalist at Weber State. “I imagine if this was brought up to the president, they would look into it.”
“Look into it”? Yeah, right. They are going to do their best to ignore it and if necessary fight it every inch of the way. It’s just like 50 years ago with signs that said “no colored people allowed”. These bigots are defying the law, denying people their inalienable rights, and should be prosecuted, fined, and jailed under 18 USC 242.
When the Intel 386 came out tech pundits joked about the computers could then wait faster for the next keystroke while running your word processing program. But Bill Gates told the world that no matter how fast the computers were that Microsoft would be able to write software that would bring them to their knees. He wasn’t joking but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out quite like he intended it.
The 386 ran at something like 15 to 25 MHz and required a separate math co-processor in order to compute the sum of two floating point numbers in anything less than dozens of clock cycles. Trig functions, square roots, or logarithms were hundreds of clock cycles without the co-processor.
Now Intel has announced quad-core processors with more cores on the way:
Intel will deliver the company’s first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.
…
Intel officials already have indicated that chips with dozens of cores might be possible by the end of this decade. The company hinted that, 10 years down the line, chips with hundreds of cores might be possible.
Mark Margevicius, a research director at Gartner, said that the move from single- to dual-core processors broke the barrier to such developments. “We’re now in a multicore world,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no looking back.”
One of these quad-core processors can do more hard core (pardon the pun) math computing in a second than my first 386 could in five hours. Now I just have to write applications than can put that processing power to useful work.
A mere 70 some years after many Jews no doubt told each other, “Careful not to piss off the Nazis. It might antagonize them” we see the German government ceding to the Jihadis’ wishes. No doubt this will be a big help in bringing “Peace In Our Time”.
Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta (K. 366) was written in 1780, and premiered in Munich in 1781. 225 years later, it has become politically incorrect– apparently banned in Germany until further notice. My! How we have progressed.
LONDON (Reuters)
Berlin security officials had warned that staging the opera “Idomeneo” would pose an “incalculable security risk.”The controversy centered on a scene in which King Idomeneo is shown on stage with the severed heads of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad and the sea god Poseidon.
This Mozart was an unusual fellow. Here’s a background of the offending opera. You can see it performed for yourself, or arrange a community showing.
On a slightly interesting side note; Mozart died in December of 1791– the same month in which our United States Bill of Rights was ratified. Both, it seems, are unpopular today among idiots.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
Ross Perot
[I was thinking of Jeff Cooper when I selected this quote. He did both.–Joe]
At first glance at the newspaper version I was only surprised by one statistic; “one in five men had homosexual experiences”. That seems a little bit high but it would depend on the exact question asked. Other bits of information include:
“Materials in our archive range from holiday makers enjoying themselves on the beach at Blackpool to the experiences of the Second World War when many people, fearing they may not survive the war, were more sexually active,” she said.
Despite the taboos of the time, the 1949 sex survey, originally meant for national newspapers but never published due to its content, found one in five men had homosexual experiences and a quarter admitted to having sex with prostitutes. One in five women confessed to extra-marital affairs.
Alan Crosby, a historian at Liverpool University, said the archives also show how attitudes to sex crimes have changed.
“Sexual offences in the past were recognized as serious crimes, just as they are today,” he said, but the punishment system was very different.
Documents detail how a man convicted of a sex crime in northern English town in 1630 was punished by being paraded through the streets and humiliated in front of fellow citizens.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a government laboratory managed by Battelle for the Department Of Energy.
I just (as in about seven minutes ago) got a hit from the DOE on my PNNL site. It turns out that their search terms on Google resulted in my site being listed number 1.
Cool.
When I casually think of an explosion I think of a rapidly expanding sphere of gases. It turns out this is rarely the case. An explosion propagates from the point of detonation along a (typically expanding) “front”. Because the pressure at the front is much greater than both ahead and behind it the gases produced, which are behind the front, expand in a direction away from the front. This video from Ry demonstrates that. The exploding targets are 7″ x 7″ x 1.375″. The gases expand into the axis parallel to the 1.375″ dimension. Until this video we did not realize this.
Whatever shape of the explosive and whereever the point(s) of detonation are affects the directions of the explosion. This is used to great effect in the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) which can, with a rather small amount of explosives, penetrate over 30 inches of renenforced concrete, or a foot of steel.
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
Richard Armour
[At no time in my memory has this been more clear than since September 11, 2001.–Joe]
Ry gives us video from one of our tests for Boomershoot 2003–Project Fireball. And contrary to what Ry says at the end of the video it did tell us what we wanted to know. I just hadn’t told Ry the entirety of my test plan prior to pulling the trigger. It went like this:
The first target used diesel instead of gasoline for the fireball fuel. It’s safer to work with and has more energy per unit volume. We thought maybe it would work. It didn’t ignite. The second target used “farm gas” which no road tax had been paid. It was cheaper than the gas we got at the Moscow gas station and was the second choice for a fuel. It worked and hence it was what we used. The third and I think fourth targets were both the 10% ethanol gas that we had purchased from the Moscow gas station and had done all our previous development with. We didn’t know if the 10% ethanol was a critical component of our success and needed to know so dozens of shooters wouldn’t be disappointed (they weren’t).
What Ry was concerned about was that once a successful ignition occurred all the following ones were guaranteed. True, but once one of them ignited that was the one we were going to use. Had I shot them in a different order then it would have invalidated the tests and Ry would have been correct.
For those of you who think Second Amendment cases can’t be won in court don’t forget that the U.S. Attorney Generals office has commented on the Second Amendment. They concluded:
For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and to bear arms. Current case law leaves open and unsettled the question of whose right is secured by the Amendment. Although we do not address the scope of the right, our examination of the original meaning of the Amendment provides extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, and no persuasive basis for either the collective-right or quasi-collective-right views. The text of the Amendment’s operative clause, setting out a “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” is clear and is reinforced by the Constitution’s structure. The Amendment’s prefatory clause, properly understood, is fully consistent with this interpretation. The broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England’s Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment’s ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require.
Of course we can’t “take this to bank” but in the right circumstances it can be very useful to help “cash in” on the overconfidence of the anti-gun bigots. Look around for an appropriate application.
Kevin and Say Uncle pointed out this Fifty Caliber Institute alert. Some people are pointing out the Unintended Consequences aspects and are euphemistically talking about law enforcement becoming more risky but there is a better way.
Federal prosecutors need to start enforcing 18 USC 242 (and 241). There are some legal and political obstacles before that becomes a viable option but I may have a way to remove some of the legal obstacles. Mr. Completely has agreed to give me a few minutes to speak at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in a few days and I plan to elaborate on how I hope to make that happen. You are going to be there, right?
At the steel match yesterday one of the better handgun shooters I know told me he has been hired by Blackwater USA and will be going to the Mideast soon as the team leader of an emergency response team. Compared to what he currently earns the pay is nearly irresistable. It’s a one-year contract with a two week vacation after six months. The first thing Barb asked when I told her about it was, “What about his wife and kids?” Well… his wife isn’t too keen on it but the pay makes it very attractive. Barb is glad I’m only as far away as Seattle and only fighting software bugs rather than halfway around the world being shot at and trying to avoid IEDs.
A year ago I was seriously considering how I could get such a contract but with my current pay the delta isn’t enough to make it that attractive and they still aren’t scrapping the bottom of the barrel hard enough to take me without prior military or law enforcement experience. I wished my friend luck and asked him to return in one piece. I hope it turns out well for him.
I attended a seminar that discussed some of the video tapes found in Afghanistan. According to the tapes using a motorcycle in an assassination was one of the things taught in the training camps. A leading woman’s rights leader was killed using this technique:
Safia Amajan, head of the province’s women’s department, was leaving her home for work when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire, police said.
She may have been targeted by Taleban militants because of their opposition to women taking part in politics and education, the BBC’s Dan Isaacs says.
Other techniques found in the tapes included taking and killing of hostages in office buildings and schools, ambushes of law enforcement, drive up kidnapping on streets, and residential assassinations. It’s what Israel deals with every day and it’s what in store for us here if we withdraw our military from the Mideast and we continue to ignore their calls for us to convert to Islam.
If you don’t believe me do you believe it if you read it in the Boston Globe?
For example, Schneier blasts almost all airport screening measures as meaningless “security theater” that makes people incorrectly believe they are safer. After all, who says the next terrorist attack will involve the methods used last time? Who says it even has to involve airplanes?
“The game of having all these tactics is one we can’t win, because terrorists get to see it in advance,” he says.
“By definition you’re going to pick a plot we’re not going to catch. It’s a game we can’t win. Let’s stop playing it.”
Instead, Schneier says the game ought to be about stopping bad people, mainly through better intelligence and police work.
That money would be much better spent, he says, than making sure that security screeners confiscate corkscrews or any other particular item from passengers.
Existing airplane “security” is about making some people feel better not making anyone more secure.