The Internet will teach you stuff

This video is another example of what NOT to do with a loaded firearm. I don't care what sort of vest you have on. If you have to test a vest, hang it on a stump and shoot it. You put on a bullet resistant vest to protect you, the same way you wear a helmet on a motorcycle. You don't test your helmet by riding into a wall at 40 mph, and you don't test a bullet resistant vest by being shot while wearing one.

How much more energy did that bullet need to enter his heart? It cleared the vest. His survival was just a matter of chance once the trigger was pulled.

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
--W. Edwards Deming

GM is now Government Motors

Funny, in a tragic, death of American business, sort of way.

If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it’s ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warranty.
--Pr. Obama, 3-30-2009

Revisiting Gun Safety

Wearing a badge, or a military uniform, does not make you immune to the laws of physics. Being familiar with a firearm does not mean you can treat it like a toy. This is a picture of an Indiana State Trooper, clowning with another police officer in a picture he put on his Facebook page. Now in the news article on the WTHR website they mention a number of questionable things he had posted about himself and his friends on Facebook. Nothing else they did rises to the level of stupid/dangerous as the behavior in this picture.

I'm guessing that they are intoxicated, although I don't know for sure. In any case, that is a revolver, pointed at the head of the officer, and he appears to be amused. It gives me a roller coaster feeling in my stomach to look at that picture, like standing at the edge of a high cliff and looking down at the trees.

Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Keep your gun pointed in a safe direction at all times: on the range, at home, loading, or unloading.
--Col. Jeff Cooper

When I was young

When I was young, and thought I was grown, I worked on F4 Phantoms. The radar and missile firing system to be precise. They were old then, close to being retired and replaced with F-18s. Now they are gone. First they went to the reserves, then we sold them to allies. Some sit in boneyards. A few are on pedestals outside the gates of military bases.

And some have been turned into flying drones, to be used for missile target practice. Neptunus Lex has video of one of these being used to test an updated Sidewinder missile.

Now I know how old Sailors feel, when they travel to watch the ship they once served on sunk to make a fishing reef.

Here's the Oriskany in 1970.


Here's her last moments.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
--Kenji Miyazawa

There's real people behind these blogs

Sad news from The Box O' Truth. His longtime friend and shooting partner, TMan, has succumbed to a heart ailment. Old Painless delivers the eulogy. I hope when my time comes, I have a friend like that. I have been to their site many times, but without his words, the memory of his friend would be lost to me.

The Box O' Truth is a great site. Lots of fun testing of guns, information, pictures, and a no nonsense approach to what ammunition really does when shot into sheet rock, water, clay, cars, padlocks, etc.

There's nothing we have to offer but our condolences and our prayers. Give the site a visit, start with the original chapters and think about the effort that went into it. It speaks of the energy and intelligence of them both. You'll learn something about your gun, or the round you are shooting through it.

Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said
Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days
That are no more, and shall no more return.
Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where have all the Primers Gone?

If you reload, you have asked this question. Are they running 24/7 and unable to put anything up for sale? It's been this way for months, so they should be ramping up, making more. But ammo is scarce, reloading components are picked over, and now, there just aren't any primers. I hope it is just a short term scarcity due to demand.

It is important when you haven't got any ammunition to have a butt on your rifle.
--Winston Churchill

The Power to Tax

The power to tax is the power to destroy. We can be taxed out of our homes, our cars, our lifestyles. Taxes raised to the level of punishment are no different than robbery. If a man comes to your home with a gun and demands 40% of your money every week, what is that? Extortion and robbery. If the government does it, it's "spreading the wealth".

The latest plan from the Obama administration is to tax health care. The New York Times noted that doesn't look so great, since Pr. Obama spoke out against this idea in the campaign.

It's the second step in destroying the health care system we have, so that they can build the nationalized health care we are going to be forced to accept. Because taxing income is the first. What happens when doctors figure out that they can make almost as much money working four days a month as they make working a full schedule? Because if they stay below the threshold for the higher tax rate, they win. They make enough, and have lots of time off. They system doesn't have enough doctors for this to work, and the sick are not served. The problem will then be "fixed" by more government intervention.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm

Took a hike this afternoon

It was sunny, still cool enough to need a jacket. The trees are budding out and the songbirds are back. We took a hike in the woods along the river. The dog roamed before us, sniffing out treasures. We talked, looked at birds with her binoculars, reminisced about the times we had hiked through that same area over the years. A good day.

I dream of hiking into my old age.
--Marlyn Doan

Once again, better than I can say it

Click on over to the Western Rifle Shooters Association and see what you think.

Lots of good stuff there. Including this one about getting in shape.

Then on to thoughts on basic survival.

Be Prepared
--The Boy Scout Motto

Is this the end of America?

From Canada's Financial Post, a question is raised.

He's saying that the entire direction the Obama administration is going will lead to our collapse. Banking, business, all of America, and by extension, the world, is at risk. That the act of creating all this "money" out of thin air is enough by itself to disrupt the world economy.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets.
--Terence Corcoran, 3-19-09

90% Tax Rate

So, they picked out some traders at AIG, and made them the patsy. Legal bonuses that were promised to the employees that doesn't make up 1/10 of 1% of the money being poured out have somehow become the centerpiece for the President and Congress. I swear it was planned. They knew some company would do something like this and pillorying them in the press would take the attention off of the politicians.

Today, at Geek With A .45 there is a post about the new 90% punitive tax laid on the traders at AIG. He even mentions Ayn Rand. She who looks like more and more like a prophet every week. He, well go hit the link and read it for yourself. I was going to post about it, but I won't find any way to say it any better.

If you are not ballistic pissed off as hell, you don't understand what's going on around you.
--Geek with a .45

I am not alone

Here's an essay from another old Marine. I am linking directly to This I Believe. It's long, but before it was over I knew I had found another Marine to add to my blogroll. The long night is slowly descending, but there are still bright lights shining. The Tartan Marine, AKA the Old Jarhead is one of them.
If he happens to visit, I hope he pulls up a ammo can and hunkers down. The beer is warm, but the conversation will be first rate.

I believe that if the chips are on the table, and lives are at stake, you’d be better to have one half-dead old Marine at your side, than all the politicians and Hollywood entertainers you could cram into hell.
--The Tartan Marine

And when they kill someone, who will be at fault?

Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners.

There's an old story about a farmer who finds an injured rattlesnake and nurses it back to health. He treats it like a friend, and one day, when it bites him and he is dying, he ask the snake why it bit him. The snake replies, "You knew I was a rattlesnake when you picked me up."

If we are so stupid as to catch people overseas dedicated to killing us all and turning our country into an Islamist state, and then release them into our own country, we deserve to lose.

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.
--Ann Coulter

Obama's Promises to Veterans.

Watch this, it's just a few seconds long.

Now compare that with the new Obama Administration plan to charge wounded and disabled veterans for their care. It won't pass Congress. Even the degraded state we have sunk too, the outrage would sweep Congress clean in the next elections. But who in the Obama Administration thought it was a good idea? Who brought this to the President and when they did, why didn't he fire them on the spot? Since he's so concerned about veterans and all...

We must never forget that honoring this service and upholding these ideals requires more than saluting our veterans as they march by on Veterans Day or Memorial Day. It requires marching with them for the care and benefits they have earned. It requires standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our veterans and their families after the guns fall silent and the cameras are turned off. At a time when we’re facing the largest homecoming since the Second World War, the true test of our patriotism is whether we will serve our returning heroes as well as they’ve served us.
--Barak Obama

Sen. Grassley wants AIG Execs to repent

Now Sen. Grassley wants AIG Execs to repent, yesterday he wanted them to kill themselves.
Let's go through this again. Totally outside any Constitutional guidelines, Congress and Pr. Obama whipped up a plan to dump hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars of our money on companies in financial trouble. In the bill was the provision that bonuses agreed to before a certain date were A-OK. AIG took the money. Having $170,000,000,000 burning a hole in their pocket, they took some.
Look, I have kids in college. Let's say I took $10,000 in $20 bills over to their house, and set it on the table and left. Later when I came back and asked what they did with it, would there be any sense at all in being outraged that they spent a thousand dollars on booze and chips? No, because I would have to be a moron to think that they would do anything else. They're college students, spare money goes to partying.
If you're a banking and investment executive, spare money goes in bonuses. It's what you do. You got yourself this fat job, and you bleed off as much as you can. I don't expect the executives to not act like executives.
I want Congress to repent, resign, appear before the American people and apologize for the disaster they have created by giving all this money to businesses. But they won't. They're members of Congress, and that's all they know. Because they've got these fat jobs too, and they're getting everything they can out of it. They won't even have the decency to pretend they're sorry and have a drink of...

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
--Will Rogers

Bonuses for Companies taking Stimulus Money

Obama: AIG Bonuses an 'Outrage' to Taxpayers is the headline in the Washington Post. Once again, Pr. Obama gets it wrong. Pr. Obama and Congress The taxpayers gave AIG $170 Billion. What they decide to with it is their business. Pr. Obama is feigning outrage. The outrage is reserved for the President and the legislators that decided to bail out failing businesses. If you fail, it's just too damn bad. The next business that comes along to do investments will do better.

Here's a newsflash, Pr. Obama. It wasn't your money to give them. You have no Constitutional authority to give money to businesses. The money you gave them wasn't real, it's just numbers on a promise of future payment. Like me trying to buy a house on an IOU.

But they got the money, and they did just what they were doing before. They gave themselves bonuses. Well, duh. Hell yea, someone gave me $170,000,000,000 and I'd be giving out bonuses. I'd give all my family and friends bonuses. I'd give anyone that reads my blog a bonus.

Work is for suckers. You end up being a taxpayer. Failure is the new American Dream. Don't just fail, fail big. Then line up at the trough and you too can get billions for your company and hand multimillion dollar bonuses to the executives.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
--Abraham Lincoln

Picking just one

The question came up again, as it does from time to time, what one rifle would you take in a survival situation? Because if you have to carry it, you're not going to be able to take the contents of your gun safe with you. We're talking about what one man can carry. Now, young trained fit soldiers can carry about 80 pounds total for any length of time. Consider your pack, your food, water, water treatment equipment, clothes, shelter, knife, first aid kit, etc. Put everything you take on a regular backpacking trip together and weigh it. Now put that handgun and whatever ammo you are planning on taking for it in the pack. Weigh it again. Put it on your back and go for a 10 mile hike.

Back already? How are your legs? Don't worry, if you do this every day, you'll regain your muscle tone and start to strengthen up in about 2 weeks. In six weeks, you'll be able to do 15 miles, make a meal, set up a tent, and then go exploring before dark every day. People that hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine either quit or get in shape in about that time. If you aren't working out, if you're carrying too much weight when you get out of the shower, it's time for a fitness plan. Make one. Stick to it.

I do backpack. I can go on a 3-4 day backpacking trip with about a 45 pound pack. That's in good weather. In the cold, add 5-8 pounds for clothes and 3-4 for your heavier sleeping bag. I keep everything that I normally take in the pack. I don't unload anything. That way, I know where things are, and I know what things I have. Add food to the top pouch, and I'm ready to go hiking.

Getting back to the rifle, either you have the extra guns and ammo, food, gear, and equipment cached somewhere secure and defensible that you can get to, or you will have to choose. The gun stores will be closed. There will be no new parts, no gunsmiths, and no ammo sales. There won't even be any new cleaning equipment. Any replacement ammo or weapons will be scrounged. That fact alone narrows the choices. You need a common rifle, chambered in a common caliber.

In the United States, I think that narrows the choices to .308, 30.06 or .223. Those are common enough that there are millions of rounds stored. I chose .223, in a standard AR-15. I bought enough magazines and ammo, shoot it often enough to stay in practice, and I reload for it. I could see an argument for an M1A or a Garand, or if you really think things are never going to stabilize, a bolt rifle in one of those calibers. In any case, you add a rifle and a couple of hundred rounds to that pack, and that's going to be a heavy load.

It's impossible to imagine how terrible things would be if this happens. Surviving the first few weeks might be the hardest challenge, and being holed up somewhere with adequate food and water would be the best plan. Wherever that somewhere is for you, put most of your stored food, guns, ammo, and equipment there. It's going to be food, and the ability to defend it, that is the real issue if things fall apart. Just thinking you could go out the door is pie-in-the-sky.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
--Charles Darwin

Who Would do This?

School buses. Damn old big yellow/orange school buses are now being considered a soft target for terrorists. Well of course. Nobody armed with anything on any of them. Some of them full of elementary school kids and one driver. An easy way to spread terror inside America.

But I want an answer. From the Governor of Pennsylvania, the mayor of Philadelphia, hell, from any elected official, right up the ladder to the current occupant of the White House. Who are we talking about in this article from the Philadelphia Intelligencer?

It's just not mentioned anywhere in that article, is it? Could be those Swedish anarchists, or the Alaskan separatists. But I don't think so, and neither do you. I'll bet the police, the military, and yes, even the politicians, have one group of people in mind when they discuss this threat.

I can tell you this, whoever you are. You want to start a war, you start killing children on school buses in the United States.

Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.
--Marcus Tullius Cicero

Personal Freedom

The flip side of defending freedom and our country overseas is defending freedom here. It's not easy, it's usually messy, and there are always people put out that their idea of freedom conflicts with someone else's idea of law. I'm a small "L" libertarian. Mostly I think that the Libertarian candidates have no chance of winning, and often appear as total whack jobs when they speak. But the concepts of libertarianism seem to make sense. I want the maximum amount of liberty for the maximum number of citizens.

War on Drugs? A waste of time and resources, corroding the Bill of Rights in a futile attempt to modify human behavior.

Gay Marriage? Who cares? Let 'em marry.

Freedom of speech and expression? Go for it. If I don't like what you have to say, I can have my say somewhere else and ignore you.

Gun Rights? (Really the right to self-defense) Near absolute. Criminals get them anyway. Laws against guns only apply to the law abiding.

Freedom of Religion? Sure. Believe what you want, worship how you want. However, if what you believe involves violently interfering with the rights of others, be prepared for a vigorous defense. One of my primary problems with organized religion is the tendency to want to make everyone think and behave the same way. I don't care if you want to spend your life in a monastery, just leave me out of it.

And so on. Even if I am a disinterested party in the activity, I try to come down on the side of greater individual rights. Don't try to say that groups have rights. They do not. Groups that think they have rights either become mobs or governments. Individuals have them. If you band together with other people that share your interests, that is your individual right to freely associate in practice.

Governments have no rights, either. They have responsibilities to the people they serve. The nature of government is to gain and consolidate power. Keeping that in check is the function of a Constitution, limiting the government to certain specific tasks. One of our major problems today is that the Federal government used the commerce clause on the Constitution to get around it's limits and now seemingly has no checks on what it does.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
--P. J. O'Rourke

Conservative America is a fact of life

I thought last week's Newsweek cover was bad. But they surpassed themselves again.

I read the article. But you'll have to take it in for yourselves. I'm not even quoting it. I'm here to talk about Conservative America. Because we're here, clinging bitterly to our religion and our guns, and all you liberals will just have to figure out how to live with it.

You have forgotten the America I grew up in. We stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. We wore our Scout uniforms to school on the meeting days. I carried my Boy Scout knife in my pocket every day from the day my dad gave it to me until I left to join the Marines. We're true believers in the Bill of Rights, we study the words of the Founding Fathers like they actually mean something. We marched in parades, believed in the American Dream.

You don't know the America I live in either. Buying a house I could afford and paying the mortgage. Saving money, paying cash, driving a used truck because I didn't want to get extended on credit for a new one. Raising children and staying married to the same woman for 30+ years. Standing in front of a TV at work on September 11th, 2001 and watching the 2nd plane hit the Towers and knowing immediately that we were at war.

I will not bend. I will not yield. I can be killed, but I cannot be converted to accept a worldview that wants to kill every Jew, and then every non-Muslim. I cannot be converted to see the good in a system that slaughters people for homosexuality, that forces women into rigid codes of behavior, that calls the murder of teenage girls "honor killings." I cannot be converted to see the value of a system that glorifies the suicide of it's young men in Jihad and calls it a moral good.

I know Radical Islam is a fact of life. National Socialism and Imperial Japan were facts of life, too. Our grandfathers decided to fight rather than surrender to evil. Today Japan and Germany are our allies, and are reasonably free countries. You need to take a hard look at Radical Islam, and then at your own country, and decide whether the United States is still worth standing up for, or if you just want to go out and buy your daughters their first burkas.

I know where I stand. It's a fact of life, too.

Lenin called them "useful idiots," those people living in liberal democracies who by giving moral and material support to a totalitarian ideology in effect were braiding the rope that would hang them. Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us today. Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam.
--Bruce C. Thornton, Professor of Classics, Cal State

Sauce for the Gander

In 2006, 51% of Democrats said they wanted Pr. Bush to fail. Wonder how many Republicans want Pr. Obama to fail? Everyone piled on Rush Limbaugh like he was the first guy in history to wish failure on someone they disagreed with. I want the Mullahs in Iran to fail and be deposed by a puppet government run from Tel Aviv. I want Kim Jong Il to go the rest of the way insane and be videotaped chewing on the edge of the carpet in his office. I want Chavez to fail so spectacularly that they make movies about it. And yes, I want the Democrats to fail.

But it isn't even what I, or Rush Limbaugh, wants that matters. Because the reality is the Democrats are failing. Just the direction and ideas that they propose drive the market lower and lower. I suspect that the final push into the current economic crisis began when smart people with money invested saw that the Democrats were going to win the White House and both houses of Congress. They bailed. Took what they could and got out of the stock market. Bought gold, put the money in Swiss banks, hid it in the mattress, whatever.

The reason I want them to fail, and fail so completely, is that I want it to happen quickly and have people notice it. So we can start to reverse this at the mid-term elections. Then find a libertarian leaning conservative and elect him to the White House in 2012.

Then we start to work to turn things around.

We have forgotten what America was like. What it was to open your own business and succeed by hard work. When most of what you made was yours, and if you were successful, people looked up to you.

Bloomberg.com has an article today calling Pr. Obama the Manchurian Candidate. They are referring to his policies as "the War on Business." If that is what is what it is, then today I have hope. I hope that the War on Business is as successful as the War on Drugs.

The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits
--Plutarch

No We are Not

Marooned said it for me today.

When I saw that magazine cover, my first thought was, "NO WE ARE NOT". The government is, and lots of people think it's just wonderful. I think it's a disaster. It will fail, the only question is what will be left after it does.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
-- Thomas Sowell

Converting Money to Noise

Shooting has become a more expensive hobby in the last couple of years. Ammo prices have doubled. A box of 100 .45ACP from Ammoman is almost $40.00. In some cases, like .223, the price has tripled.
So I started reloading last year. Then a friend of mine convinced me to start bullet casting. I started casting .45 caliber bullets and reloading my own ammo for several different calibers. With cast bullets and reused brass, my cost per 100 is under $5.00. Even with purchased jacketed bullets, it's about $15.00 per 100. I get to shoot more.
This was the first warm weekend of the year here in North Carolina, and a lot of members were at the club. I was running some test loads and here was the result. This is 3 magazines, 24 rounds, using bullets from Montana Gold and Titegroup powder. I was using a Para-Ordnance 1911 at 50 feet. I think I'm finally getting this reloading figured out. Reliable, accurate, and affordable. Oh yeah, in keeping with the cheapness theme, paper plates make great targets. I just put a target paster in the middle to give me something to aim at.

I shoot an arrow into the air, where it lands I do not care: I get my arrows wholesale!
--Curly Howard of the Three Stooges

Tell Me Another One

Click here to find out where the Mexican drug cartels are buying their weapons. Because those grenades and full auto weapons did not come from a civilian gun store. Not one I can shop at, anyway. It's a lie.

The U.S. Government gave them away. And they have lost control of thousands of them, no records, no oversight.

From October 2001 through March 2006, DoD reported providing excess defense articles with an acquisition value of $2 billion to 57 foreign governments.
-- from the Inspector General's Report available at this link

This isn't even funny at all

It's just sadly true. Here's one article from Bloomberg.com, you can use Google News to search AIG if you need to see more. The value of AIG stock at the opening bell on March 5, 2008 was $45.82, today it was 50 cents. They need to be allowed to fail. Because fail they will, and the only question now is how much of our money will be thrown away in the process

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
--Ayn Rand

Adding to the Blogroll

Last night I was looking at information on bullet casting, and ran across a link to PawPaw's House. He's been blogging since 2005, and has a thoughtful viewpoint and a lot of interesting posts. I spent some time picking around his archives. This is an example of his posting about bullet casting, the kind of detailed information I was seeking.

My other add to the blogroll is Iowahawk. I have been meaning to add him for some time. Funny, snarky, over the top. I wish I had the chops to write like him. His latest offering is titled Memo to America's Irresponsible Tea Party Whiners and is one of his finest. Here's the money quote for me:

Now, I'm as sympathetic to a good sob story as anybody, but these whiners have nobody to blame but themselves for their predicament. Anyone who kept track of the Gallup presidential polls last year should have known what was coming, so don't blame me if you decided to waste your money paying your stupid mortgage.
--Iowahawk

Funny, but True

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
--Thomas Jefferson