Sunday, July 29, 2012

Regulating Guns

Justice Sclaia has said in an interview that he feels that guns may be regulated, but wityhout going into any detail. Just the word 'regulation' sets the gunnies off so the interview, no matter how weaseled the words is bound to cause a certain amount of panic.

OTOH, when one considers that everything in the first amendment for example, is regulated to the extent that the abuse of a right is subject to curtailment, the idea doesn't seem so bad. Speech, for example is free, but there are laws covering perjury, libel, slander, and incitement to various forms of anti-social behavior.

Gun use is already covered in this respect with statutes for example controlling discharge within the city limits except under certain well defined circumstances. The law is also pretty clear as to the difference between offensive and defensive use.

The problem is the parable of the camels nose, when does it stop? England comes to mind.

QOTD - Bringing Them Along

Anti-gun for 25+ years then turned into a budding sociopath in just over an hour. Sarah Brady's worst nightmare just came true. Damn! I'm good.
This from Joe Huffman, who like me likes to turn money into smoke and noise. The difference is that he has an actual budget for this.

Along the same lines, my student has decided she likes the sport, hijacked my Ruger Mk II, took up steel challenge, signed up for an Appleseed event, and just bought a Stevens .22 rifle, and a Browning Buckmark.

This weekend she decided to come up for a defensive pistol shoot. She said she had scored 2 boxes of .38 spl, so I thought she was bringing her Security Six. Wrong. She arrived without a center fire pistol. Had I known this, I'd have loaned her one of mine, but the first I heard of the problem was at the range. The nice people at the club found her a 9mm and loaned her some ammo to shoot with and the R.O. was nice enough to give her all sorts of pointers as she went through the course.

She'll be back.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Obama Calls For Return Of Assault Weapons Ban

Return with us now to those thrilling days of the Clinton administration when the Assault weapons ban, coupled with Hillarycare cost the president both houses of congress for the remainder of his term.

Of course the moderating influence of the Republican congress, coupled with Clintons pragmatism and the Republican penchant for picking candidates so boring the base has a hard time getting out of bed to vote for them got the Slickster another term.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Islamic Group Supports Gun Control

Of course they do. A religion who's proselytizing methods run to rape, murder, and arson certainly doesn't want to be meeting armed infidels.

Besides, gun control laws don't normally cover their weapon of choice, the bomb.

Gun Controll, Finally a Good Idea

Mayor Bloomberg has called for cops to go on strike until America passes better gun controll.
Well, I would take it one step further. I don't understand why the police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say, we're going to go on strike. We're not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what's required to keep us safe.
After all, police officers want to go home to their families. And we're doing everything we can to make their job more difficult but, more importantly, more dangerous, by leaving guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, and letting people who have those guns buy things like armor-piercing bullets.
Apparently he or more likely one of his staff thought about this and he's currently backpedaling like mad. Think about it: A police strike, leaving everyone responsible for their own protection, and no cops to bust you for carrying without a permit.

Obama and I (can't do this by myself you know) will be starting a cleanup service which will remove dead goblins and take them to the landfill for a nominal fee. I can also recommend a reputable carpet cleaning service. This would be the best argument for permitless concealed carry I can think of.

Tell the boys in blue that we support them in this. Take the week off, turn off the radios and radar guns, and occupy Dunkin Donuts. We're behind you 100%. Boo-Yah!

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Theater Shooting

...and other stuff. Spent last night hanging with the homies at the Blog fest in the hope that some of their talent would rub off on me, and I believe it did. Jed had put together a motivational poster featuring B.O., J. Holmes, and Sarah Brady, suggesting that without government help, the massacre would not have been as big a success disaster as it turned out to be.
Here's my variant, keeping all the enablers as representatives of the government:

Now as much as I love a good conspiracy theory, there are some that lack the MDR of credibility required to make a successful one.  Here's one already that claims the theater massacre was an inside job, masterminded by the government to swing public support in favor of the UN arms treaty. A great deal of thought obviously went into this. I'm thinking probably more than a bit too much. When the level of complexity rises above a certain point, the credibility factor falls below the Willing Suspension of Disbelief threshold and the dreaded Giggle Factor comes into play. Still, full marks for creativity.


Discussions also proceeded mostly derisive of the idea that without government, business cannot succeed. Of course if you grant that government is a large factor in the creation and operation of any business, the statistic that 90% of all business start-ups end in failure begins to make a good deal more sense.

Update: My original thought was to use Obama and Eric Holder as the enablers, but I thought yo myself: How could the government possibly be providing guns to a madman? I was wrong.

Drudge: Obama's Least Favorite Bundler?



OBAMA CAMPAIGN RUNS DEFICIT IN JUNE...


Spent $2.6 million -- on polling?


Paid $93k for Half-Empty Stadium Kick-Off Event...


US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s...

Rich Getting Poorer; Paying More Taxes...

From Drudge this morning. With any luck, Obama will leave the Dem Party broke and forever known as the Party of Poverty. 

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Home Made Jacketed .40 S&W bullets

I found one of the bullets I previously mentioned at the range:
Here's the front view. Hollow point, jacketed, has bounced off something.
Side view showing rifling marks. I picked it up thinking it was a piece of 9mm reloadable brass.
Yup, 9mm Luger. That's lead showing through the primer pocket.
The stuff opens up impressively, but I suspect it requires a very hard target to perform properly.

Friday, July 20, 2012

White Academic Elite Goes On Rampage

Speaking with the same degree of authority as Brian Ross:

White academician J. Holmes, disappointed at not being named to the Obama Cabinet or at least head of the ATF went on a shooting spree in a crowded theater, demonstrating his flexibility in the interpretation of the phrase "fire in a crowded theater".

Word leaking out is that he's a recent immigrant from California, which should lead to pressure on the legislature here to tighten up our border controls.

The howls for increased gun control came so rapidly that one wonders if the Brady Bunch didn't have advance knowledge of the atrocity and was using it as part of an orchestrated effort to move their stalled agenda. Come on Jpete, what did you know, and when did you know it?

Meantime it has been reported that Mr. Holmes had help. So far no comment on this from Mr Holder, who may have supplied the firearms, or Mr Obama, who facilitated his movements.

\F

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Pelosi Throws Obama Under The Bus

Full story here. The Wicked Witch of the West has told her fellow Democrats that being associated with the president may be hazardous to their electoral health, so if they don't live in the safest of districts, it's understandable that they stay home rather than attend the upcoming re-coronation.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Economics

Better a million wage earners die in poverty under a bridge than one clever fellow be allowed to keep enough money to give one of them a job.

Story here

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Gun Fun, Of A Sort

I just shot the current e-postal match with my venerable Nylon 66. This classic came to me complete with a BSA 4-7x scope of the sort I used to commonly see mounted on BB guns and air rifles. Prep for shooting a 10-round target involves loading 14 rounds, shooting 2 rounds at a sighter target, adjusting the sights, taking 2 more shots on the sighter, then firing the remaining 10 rounds at the squirrels, allowing for the last offset.

I found that if I set the rifle down, even on a padded surface, the zero would move up to one inch in some random direction, requiring the sighting drill be done all over. I do believe that the scope, classic though it may be, has reached the end of its usable lifespan.

I have a 1.5-6 x 40mm scope left over from another experiment which should serve well even if it evokes thoughts of the (\facetious) mounting of the 9-24 x 34mm varmint scope on the Raven .25 auto. No I didn't do that, Google it yourself. The picture was hilarious.

The Future Of Transportation - Electric

The Norwegians announce a prototype electric motorcycle with flash styling, a top speed of 100 mph, and a GVW of 67 lbs.
Liberal use of carbon fiber offsets the slightly heavier batteries selected. Max range is listed as 60 miles, but probably not at 100 mph.

For reference, the Corbin electric motorcycle, built in San Jose in the 70's, had a top speed of 70 mph and a range of 70 miles. This produces a Billlls performance index (r) of 4900 vs 6000 for the Roskva.
I suppose a 20% performance improvement is nice for 40 years of engineering effort, but I still wonder what the number would look like if we divided the (range x top speed) by the price. Graphite is not cheap.

This project was done by college students, which means worst case it cost tuition and board for 5 at a Norwegian university for one semester. A bargain compared to the Volt which costs you and me a cool quarter mil for each one put on the road. I've seen two of these on my daily commute, neither one of which was on fire. I've also seen a couple of Bentlys, which rounds the total out to an even million bucks in rolling stock. I'm pretty sure I had no financial interest at all in the Bentlys.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Gun Safety

O.K. it's not guns.

Rule 3: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.

Rule 3a: Do not put the button in your hip pocket and flop on the couch.

H.T. to Theo Spark for the lead. Video at The Gun Zone, credited to Weasel Zippers.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Milestone

Sometime late last night, Sitemeter says I got my 100,000th visitor. I was too late to see who it might have been, but based on the records for most visited posts, I hope you found the Pink Pistols post to be everything you hoped it would be.

Health Care

I had gotten the impression all along that there was something wrong with the arguments for nationalizing health care. The complaint that it was excessively expensive, and therefor had to be managed by the government. Government management is famous for reducing efficiencies and the only way I could see this helping is if the newly reorganized system is set up to be immune from frivolous lawsuits.

I've not heard of the ATLA coming out against Obamacare, so I assume the gravy train will still be running.

What this article notes is that the cost of health care is exponentially proportionate to your age and your income. The older you get the more expensive it gets to keep you alive, and the more you make, the more you can afford it.
Subject of course to the law of diminishing returns. Note that 75 is regularly reached with incomes as low as $10K/year, and getting wealthier boosts this all the way to 78 or 80. I'm going to guess that the best way to lengthen your life span is to be more careful how you choose your parents.

The best way to keep costs down is to begin planning early. If you're already 78 years old, and the doctor says the reason you've been feeling poorly lately is because you've got one of the nastier forms of cancer, perhaps the best bet would be to forgo treatments, which would zero out your estate and extend your life maybe 6 months. Instead use the remaining 3 months to get your affairs in order. Plan a funeral with an open bar, on a chartered cruise ship, and invite enough people to zero out your estate anyway.

Your heirs will be less annoyed with you when they hear the money's gone than they would be if they went to the will reading and found that the bit that didn't go to the hospital was left to the home for retired hookers in Las Vegas and they've been cut out.

Econ 101

The merry crew over at Trifecta have a video up describing how they think the Dems would react to a President Romney and presumably a republican congress energizing the economy and producing 6% growth. The metaphor used was a clip of a woman who looks too much like Nancy Pelosi riding in a race car, starting out terrified, but ending up liking it.

Folks, this has happened before, and it's been thoroughly documented. Reagan took office following the Carter malaise, and proposed tax cuts to energize the economy. Mr Reagan never did have a Republican Senate, and only had the house for the first two years of his presidency. All the tax cuts passed in the first year had to be phased in over two years so as not to upset any apple carts.

I remember those two years, with no one willing to do anything until the full measure of the cuts arrived, then the economy took off like the proverbial scalded cat.

In spite of this Reagan never did capture the Senate, and quickly lost the house to the Dems who were terrified of offending the Russians with the Reagan defense buildup. With the rapidly expanding economy came rapidly expanding tax revenues even with the cuts in place, and Dems being Dems, spending bills routinely came to 125% of income. The resulting deficits were blamed on Republicans, which was fair, as had Reagan not signed the bills, they might not have overspent as much.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Bowling Pins

Saturday was partly cloudy and no more than 90 degrees, so one could hang about between tables and not collapse from the heat. I won 5 of 10 tables. Lost 2 I should have won, and won one I shouldn't have, so I'm happy.

My assistant scorekeeper, an undergrad from Colo School of Mines saved the day when the whiteboard markers all went dry (I hate it when the technology fails), and we agreed that the job could be easily done on XL. She said she had a laptop with a 15 hour battery and would gin something up in time for the next match. Boo-yah!

That afternoon at a block party we got .9" of rain in about 20-30 minutes. One of the attendees had a rain gauge and verified this.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash - World Revenge Tour

7pm – Close, 21 July 2012
The Old Mill Brewery & Grill, Littleton, CO


For all the Rocky Mountain bloggers and their close personal stalkers friends. 

The reason and instigator is Zombie.

Drone Stalking

Here's a report of a journolist being stalked by someone's drone while out walking his dog 9in the woods.

Didn't Jefferson recommend walking in the woods with a gun?

Besides there's a bounty on those things. I would recommend #4 buck in a wooded environment.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

10 Worst Cars

Here's an article from The Street, describing the author's position on the 10 worst cars ever produced. I take some exceptions to the list, of course, as some of them made the list because of bad styling or bad timing of the release. And yes, a couple of them just shouldn't have been done at all.

What makes a car good or bad? I'm thinking that it should start and run reliably, not leak in the rain, not fall apart, and have a reasonable life expectancy. Obviously engineers are not slaves to fashion.

That said, the Trabant, the Vega, and the Yugo all belong on the bad side of the list. The Trabbi was a molded fiberglass kids suitcase with a snowmobile engine. It was completely designed and built in the East Bloc during the cold war, and it showed. The Yugo was a Fiat, made in the same conditions. In it's defense, the Italians franchised several plants to the commies, presumable on the condition that the name FIAT should never be mentioned when marketing the cars. Of the Yugo, Skoda, Dacia, and Lada, the Yugo was the best of the lot. Scary.

The Chevy Vega was in effect, a hand grenade whose pin was removed when it rolled off the lot. An otherwise good idea, ruined by doing everything wrong it was possible to do. The engine had a life expectancy of about 60,000 miles before it began burning oil. Repairing the engine was a waste of time as the body rusted out in about the same timeframe.

Taking exception to the list begins with the Edsel. There was really nothing wrong with the car, aside from the quirky grill, and it was intended to be an upscale version of the Fords it was built on. Introducing an ugly upscale car at the beginning of a recession was just bad luck.

The Isetta 300 was introduced in Germany as cheap transportation for people in a country still clearing the rubble of WWII away. Smaller and less powerful than the Beetle, it would still get you where you were going, reliably and dry. 55 years of engineering expertise applied to the concept later, and we have the Smart For Two. If you're 20-something and immortal, it's reliable enough and fashionably funkey.

Ford could have dropped the Pinto and kept the Mustang II, and in so doing, driven Ralph Nader away, notwithstanding both cars were one and the same. This also would have returned the Mustang to its roots as an entry-level pocket rocket. Easier to rebadge the Capri, I guess.

Health Care Reform

Sen McConnell, (R?-maybe) has gotten on the "Repeal and Replace" bandwagon, at least partially in an interview with the National Review. Repeal and replace always makes me nervous as this sort of implies the RINO making the pledge is suggesting that he could run the nationalized health care system better than the Dems, which is decidedly NOT what I'm looking for.

He says he doesn't want to give away the playbook before the elections, but then lists highlights of the game plan that pretty well signal his intentions.
There won’t be a 2,700-page Republican alternative. What the majority did in 2009 and 2010 was take a meat axe to the American health-care system. What we should have done is take out a scalpel and go step by step to make some adjustments. Among the things that we’ve mentioned is interstate health-insurance competition, which is not there today; medical-malpractice reform, to try to deal with the issue of defensive medicine. These are targeted approaches that tackle the cost of health care, which is what Obamacare completely failed to address.
Suggesting that the otherwise laudable reforms can be done by taking a scalpel to the existing bill is hogwash.  Removing any part of the healthcare bill will be fought tooth and nail by the Dems, and anything that isn't outright stated as a tax, is protected by the filibuster rules in the Senate, so repeal is pretty unlikely.

The reforms he is proposing are what should have been done in the first place, but shorting the trial lawyers and denting in-state insurance monopolies is an attack on the Dems base and will be bitterly opposed as well.  The Senator proposes a good result. I eagerly await his actual game plan.

3-Gun Fun

My club had a 3-gun match last weekend. It was fun and challenging, a real learning experience, so here’s what I learned:

1. Events that involve shooting and moving are an athletic endeavor. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Spending the day before the match with your feet up will improve your scores, especially if match day temps are running +100°. Working late the day before will drag you down

2. Having the only rifle in the match that didn’t carry a 20-round mag meant 2 extra reloads. This was a minimally annoying problem as reloads in a semi-auto don’t take all that long. NOTE: At very short ranges, a rifle with 2.5” of offset between the sight and the barrel will shoot 2.5” lower than the sights indicate. At these distances, aiming is counterproductive, just point and shoot. It helps you avoid giving the no-shoot stapled to the front of the target a new ½ bullet diameter part to his hairline.

3.The shotgun stage involved 23 rounds, the first six of which were slugs at 35 yards. Six slugs in quick succession and you’ll have a flinch that will stay with you the rest of the stage.  Also after 12 rounds in quick succession, reloading gets to be a challenge as the barrel is now really hot. It was interesting to note that the shotgun with slugs had a higher muzzle velocity (1600 fps) than my rifle (1300 fps).

4.Both stages were 2-gun stages, which meant using the long gun to get to your pistol and 1 magazine. You still have to carry spare mags for the pistol in addition to whatever ammo you carry for the long guns. In any case this is a weighty load of ammo, and in the case of the shotgun, cargo pant’s work well. Just put the open top box of shells in a cargo pocket, and off you go. It’s still heavy and clunky.

5.After shooting pistol matches all year long with an 8-round load limit, when you hear that the upcoming match will have no load limit for pistols, you should disassemble and clean your pistol mags to remove the dirt from the bottom of the mags before the match. The first few rounds will feed more smoothly.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

This has gotten to be something of a rhetorical question over the last few years, but...

Roger Simon has a piece on the state of the nation called the Last 4th of July. He goes on at some length on the sorry state of things and what might be done to rectify it. The line that jumped out at me was this one:
The road between this Fourth of July and November 6 will be rocky, again in the extreme, perhaps terrifyingly so. In the worst economy since the Great Depression, it’s hard to believe roughly half our fellow citizens still favor the incumbent. But they do. Faced with that level of cognitive dissonance, the struggle ahead will be nothing short of titanic.
Remembering that in 1938, the Really Great Depression had been going on for nearly 10 years with no end in sight. The Treasury Secretary had noted this and remarked that all the administration had to show for their efforts was a huge national debt and observed that based on results, none of them should be re-elected.

Nonetheless, the argument that one shouldn't changes horses in mid-stream held, and everyone got re-elected. Perhaps they were right. 10 years or so later, the depression officially ended.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Dog Tricks

The Nevada Highway Patrol introduced dogs to sniff out randomply stopped vehicles, and help the patrolmen ferrit out drugs.

Turns out the dogs had been trained to alert on cue, giving the cops probable cause to search and seize anything and everything in, on, or near the car. Lucrative operation until some of the officers ratted the scam out.

Music Hath Charms...

...to soothe the savage breast.

I could recognize most of them but toward the end, it began to sound quite unfamiliar.

Anyway I could use some soothing right now.

H.T. to Theo Spark for this one.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

New .40 S&W Ammo

I saw some ammo at the range yesterday that has to be seen to be believed. Or maybe you've all seen it and I'm late to the party. Anyway, you start out with brass from S&W 40 and a 9mm.
When I put the brass together in the tumbler, they mate up nicely.
So one takes the 9mm brass, swages it out to .401 in a press, and fills it with lead to make a jacketed hollow point which I don't have a picture of. Use your imagination. It looks a lot like the above picture except the end is lead and hollow instead of plated and round.

They seem to feed just fine, and the hollow point expands impressively:
This is the back end, obviously, and the front end:
Ker-Splat! This one was shot on a steel target. The lead splattered, but the brass jacket opened up nicely, don't you think?

Google Anti-Gun?

There's a meme going about that suggests that Google may be going the way of Pay-Pal and E-bay in suppressing searches related to guns or gun parts.

I just searched Ruger pistol parts on Google, and game up with 2.8M hits.

I guess not everybody has gotten the memo yet.