11 Years Ago

Major Lawrence Caudill USMC ret. invented a gun-term.

"Carry your gun - it's a lighter burden than regret."

It wasn't that long after he had gone on and on about why the gun is civilization.

Those fake Marines really get around.    Though, I thought only sailors were named Lawrence?

Happy Thanksgiving

This is concerning

According to this guy:

People with Read Coats are coming for my guns. 

I am picturing the wardrobes of these dastardly rights deniers. (writes deniers?)

Oh dear, oh dear

I thought I had something for this space...

---

Need to get my oil change done soon.  My new-fangled 21st Century car tells me now.  Instead of 30k miles, then 35, then 40...  The car keeps track.  I got 8,000 out of this last one.

If i had to guess

If I had to guess, the DGU guy from Kingston might not be a perfect angel...  But so what?  Sounds like he defended himself legit, and even non-angels get that.  Good on ya, fella.

Also, it shouldn't matter your financial means in whether or you can exercise self-defense.  This man is far from wealthy, but he has the same rights as anyone.

That old dream comes back

Variations of this dream are recurring, throughout my life.

I am at my grandparent house that was on the Chesapeake bay, south of the Patuxent River mouth, north of the Potomac's, with a great big wide horizon.  In the 70's you couldn't see the far shore, so nothing but water to the East.  I was sleeping on the porch, and it was winter.  I must have woke up around 6 because the sun was just peaking up.  Then the moon zipped up past it, incredibly fast and impossibly full.  The bay was full of ice.  Not the usual ice, but like Great Lakes floes.  Then a hull came right at the house out of the northeast.   No mast or upper works.  It had a stylized figurehead emblem.  Not a person but like a capital letter B.  It beached and drove up, but shy of the house.  There were Roman soldiers on board.  I had to get an English to Latin dictionary of the grandfathers to communicate with them.

It's a good dream.  Rarely do the random ships land.

Inspirations that triggered this dream:

• cold weather camping
• commuting at sunrise
• thought of Lake Erie
• playing World of Warships
• thinking of my grandparents
• listening to the History of Rome podcast

Break In

I could be convinced otherwise

But, for me, a firearm 'break-in period' where you shoot it a bunch to round over any sharp corners and condition it or 'shoot it loose' is bushwa.  If a gun left the factory 'too tight' and they expect YOU to make it a functioning piece through use?  That's not right.

That said, pobodys nerfect.  Sometime a gun fails, when new, and that does not necessarily mean it is a lemon.  It might need a adjustment that the factory failed to make.  The gun assembler isn't as expert as they used to be.

Example:  My Hudson.  Glad I didn't send it back.  All it needed was an adjustment to the extractor and it runs fine now, and I was lucky enough to have the expertise to toubleshoot that myself.  If you mailed yours back and the company went bankrupt?  Well, sucks to be you.

What a 'break in period' does do, for me, is determine a baseline reliability of your new firearm.  I have learned, through my gunsmith training, it is a good idea to see if your new gun can do 250 rounds of the ammo you intend to shoot through it without failure.

If it fails on round 240 for your Federal HST, well, make you adjustment, and start this expensive test over.  If you buy a custom gun you should expect this sort of test to be done for you before they slap on a $5000 price tag.

If you believed you had to do the break in period to loosen up you custom gun, well, YOU are doing the build testing, not the reliability testing.  A gunsmith worth anything (or lucky) should aim to make a gun that WORKS when it leaves the assembly bench and heads to the range. 

(I was the lucky kind, I must admit.  Twice.)

Now let me read that Shooting Illustrated article past the headline....

Yup, condition your new pistol is a scam and a cover for non-existent QC.


And since you can count on a LOT of $600 or less guns to work through 250 rounds flawlessly right out of the box, you'd think the $6000 one would work AND be pretty.

When Epstein Died

It was reported that the video cameras were malfunctioning. Plural cameras.

So, that was baloney, fake news?  Now the cameras work fine that the guy on the top of the heap says so?  Is someone independent of all this looking at the hours footage, if there is any?  There is plenty of erroneous news reports out there, though, and we in the gun community know that. 

If Barr had indicted Hillary for her top secret email server in her bathroom, or a Biden or Kerry relative of taking payoffs from foreign governments, or something like where an unexpected person high up in the food chain of the establishment gets at least some comeuppance...  that I might now believe the AG's word on this.

You understand why I am a little dubious?

Flight Gloves

A commenter asks:  "Where do you buy them?  No one seems to sell them."

You mean, besides Amazon?  'Flight Gloves' in the search bar returns tons of various prices.

The .mil style Milsurp catalogs I bet carry them.  Like Cheaper Than Dirt.  Online or physical paper catalog.

But say you want a physical store and have no access to Post Exchange on a military base?  I'd try the dwinding number of brick and mortar Military Surplus stores.  Then gun shows.   

What to take on Safari

What do you take on Safari?

I can tell you what not to take.  Selfies.

That Jimmy Johns guy gets's PETA up his arse for going hunting in Africa.  Thing is, he gave it up 15 years ago.  But every few years PETA posts an old photo of him standing next to dead charismatic mega fauna and now erryone has to donate to kitty murderers at PETA and eat Subway?

And it's always someone new.  Like this lady.

The lesson here, maybe don't take pictures of your hunting trips.  If you do, maybe don't smile.  Or pose with the game you harvested.  Even hunting ethically will get the anti-hunting zealots up your posterior if they see a propaganda value in your images.

Or take all the smiling pictures posing near nude next game you fell, but be careful not to leak them somewhere they can get on social media and come back to you.

I mean, still do it.  The hunt stuff you enjoy, I mean. Still hunt.  And enjoy it.  That's one of the Hater's biggest goals.  To make you miserable enough that it's no fun anymore and you quit.  And take a n00b with you.  Get them to have fun.  Cook up that meat in the smoker after wrapping it in bacon, server that backstrap with taters.  Nom.  Just be mindful about giving ammunition to the enemy

That High School Shooting in Cali?

They are claiming the kid got an 80% lower and made the 1911 himself.

There were reports it jammed once during his spree.

Having made a couple 1911, I am impressed he was able to do that on his own, as a teenager, and get a pistol out of it that only jammed once with one magazine.  It is non-trivial to accomplish even that level of 'success.'

To maximize his chances of getting something that works even that much (presuming the kid built it and not his dead father 3 years ago) he must have eschewed oversized parts that require lots of fiddling and fitting.  And lubricate the crap out of it.  But it's hard to pick up for book and instructional videos the, say, proper tension of an extractor, and to know to avoid significant pitfalls in the build process with only 16 years of life under your belt.  If he was lucky with his parts pile he'd have a rattly 1911 that would work.

"But T-Bolt, facotry workers in 40s threw these together by the millions with minimal futzing!"

Yes, they did, but there was a guy around that trained the final assemblers and helped the final assemblers when they ran into problems.  A secretive murderous 16 year old has nothing to fall back on besides the internet, and the internet is fat least three quarters BS.  If the kid made the pistol he had to have been kinda clever at least.  It can be easy, but not THAT easy.

Kid's still an asshole, tho.  And what a gawd-awful waste.  If you insist, and were gonna off yourself, what is wrong with chugging a bottle of Lye, huh, punk?

(All this presumes the media and California aren't just lying to us about it all.  And they probably are.)

How did we get through?

How did we get through the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s without a LOT more gun control?

I mean, they go full court press of any shooting, today, with two or more victims that isn't standard gang land.

And with that they are getting more and more traction toward passing restrictions.  But they are fighting a trend that doesn't help them.  Murders are down, and have been for decades.

Not true in the old days.  Murders were trending UP, those decades.  Awfully.  Plus high profile assassinations.  How did we escape with ONLY the 1968 GCA and the 1994 AWB?  If the bad guys coming after our rights couldn't make a total ban out of those trendlines then what hope do they have now?

Well, they always have a chance, but the upstream swim for them is an advantage for the good guys.

I am too sedentary

I need to move more.

I also hate summertime heat.

"Well, I got good news for ya, T-Bolt!  It's cool outside.  Go for a walk."

Sounds like a good idea, I will do that.  Brisk enough to get the heart rate up a bit.   It won't make me skinny, but it might make me stay on the right side of the dirt a little longer.  T-Bolters like to die of cancers, not heart conditions.  I don't wanna be the first.

-----

Ugh, I remember why I have been reticent to wear out some shoe leather.  My spine is jacked up.  Walking a mile, even, exacerbates it.  I bet continued walking will fix it up as long as I don't overdue it.  "You are old T-Bolt, but keep at it.  Baby steps wins the race."

Hey, remember how camping on the cold hard ground DIDN'T bother your decrepit spine?  Sleep on the floor at home!

Careful in your 20s folks.  Be active, but don't abuse your body. 

We, the public

Know more about that Cali school shooting a week ago where 2 people died than we know about the Vegas shooting more than a year ago where DOZENS died.

Standard Monday

I shoulda saved my canteen post for today.

I obviously compose Monday posts on Sunday.  Or before if I have a lotta post ideas in my tank.  But Sunday's are lazy, I guess.  So I come up empty.

Tam, on Facebook, posted a nice picture of Melody Lauer doing some range instructing.  Part of that picture showed a double holster at the 6 o'clock position on the gentleman (in a red t-shirt) she was training.  Sorta like this:

You know, for dual wielding.

I don't know if I need one or want one, but I kinda like that this exists.  With this rig, a holster at 3 and 9, maybe opposing Appendix carry, both pockets, something small on both ankles, and double shoulder holsters you could be carrying...

Carry the two...

ALL the pistols.  All of them.

Boy, howdy, but don't fall in water that is over your head.

Which is it?

Do you think the gun used in this recent officer involved shooting was:

A)  After it was turned in at a gun buyback in 2004 someone then resold back into the black market, eventually ending up in the dead gang members hands 15 year later

or

B)  A bent Chicagoland cop snagged it from the pile, always intending to use it as a relatively untraceable Drop Gun. If he needed one. 

I lean B. 

Hey!

Is that a Maytag?

Water

While reading George Peto's account on the Battle of Peleliu he mentioned he had two pint canteens or summat.

The language confused me?  Did he have two 16 ounce canteens, or one, single, 1 quart canteen.  And he just preferred to so saw 2-pint instead of 1-quart.

And yesterday that came back to me and made me think.

Which is it.

I thought all canteens from WWII onward were the same shape.  Metal back in WWII, and plastic in Nam, and thinner plastic today.   But the same size and shape.  And can fit in a canteen cup.  Sorta NATO standard by now  (and maybe a 'litre').  Might have even been pretty close to today's shape in WWI.

But I could be wrong.  Maybe the Marines used a smaller version, and just carried two instead of one.  I can see advantages to that.

And I know Marines carried 2 canteens, one on each hip, in some circumstances, was practiced.  Seen many pictures of that in various theaters thoughout time.  But they never let me measure those canteens.

Singles at Guadalcanal, that look like quarts:

And I have never seen an obvious miniaturized version of that.  Gonna chalk it up to Peto just saying Two-Pint instead of Quart.  Until one of you nice people corrects me.

Maryland Shall Issue

They just sent me an email saying I have unsubscribed from their email list.  I had not.

Careful MSI!  Don't purge your email list.  Clearly a Bloomberg hacking plot. 

Quick!

Get some busybody journalist to do a colonoscopy on this Jeopardy player and find out he doesn't like Rap music, or thinks Climate Crisis is a commie scam, or once when he was 16 used an ethnic slur, so that he can then be 'cancelled' and driven from the public square for trying to fix Alex Trebek's cancer because he happens to like Trebek!

‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Who Almost Brought Alex Trebek To Tears Announces Fundraiser For Cancer Research