Convoy

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I just wanted to name one post that...

It's stuff like this that will increase people's interest in buy more off-books guns.  Such a shame that I am done buying guns. 

“I have NO confidence whatsoever that some sort of gun registry doesn't already exist, in light of the NSA revelation, IRS revelation, AP wiretap revelation, etc.” — Rob Olive

Stormageddon

Well, they were predicting a biggish storm for yesterday evening, and I am writing this post before that.  So, right now, I may have no power.  Like last year when this happened.  This time I have a freezer full of nothing but ice blocks.

Thrown back into the stone age in a blink.

How will I survive?  Well, I should have gotten the email sale advertisement for this a month ago.  4320 serving of food with a shelf life of 25 years.  That's almost 4 years of meals for me.  Plenty of time to get the crops in if I was the last man on earth. 

Hmm, last man on earth...  I think a better strategy if you have the planet to yourself is to move near a body of water.  Except for the contamination from industrial wastes and the nuke plants that use the Bay and it's tributaries the Chesapeake would make a great, relatively easy, protein factory after 4 years of no commercial fishing pressure.  But yes, lone man, get near a body of water.  Fin and feather to add to your bounty.

Serendipty

Webley Fosbery has been around recently, and I saw this latest treatment on Forgotten Weapons.  And I am re-reading The Maltese Falcon.

Guess what pistol is use to off Sam Spades partner, Miles Archer?  It'd be like me writing a detective story and someone is shot with a Medusa.  And I read this on the same day I saw thw blog post.  Serendipitous.

That Fosbery sure is an odd duck of a pistol.  To stretch the metaphor, neither fish nor fowl.  I was thinking, "why would you DO that?  A Franken-Revolver monstosity."   Then it occurred to me.  You couldn't just select a semi-auto pistol at the time.  There was none sitting around.  They were all being developed concurrently.  Colonel Fosbery did his tinkering on a Colt SAA.  Browning and Lugers were around but they were so new they squeaked.

Just thought it interesting.

So Archie takes one in the pump from a Webley Fosbery, falls backwards over a waist high horizontally boarded fence, knocking loose the top rail.  And Sam Spade doesn't normally carry a gun on him, and comes to the scene from a sound sleep wearing a thin union suit under his suit, gartered socks, tweed overcoat, and hat, of course.  Only thing in his pockets is cigarette papers, Durham tobacco, and money.  Not even a pen knife.

--------

Also, Hammett's detectives often smoked these Fatimas when they bought a pack.  I thought he might have made them up.  Hammett was no Stephen King, always name dropping brands and trademarks.  A sign was an "ad for Gasoline" rather than a "Esso sign."  Except for cigarettes.  Those get named.  Minute detail on a man's jewelry, but never the man's car.  A square cut ruby with 4 surround baguette cut diamond holding his ascot?  Great.  A $5 gold piece from 1895 as a tie tack?  Fine.  Was he driving a DeSoto or a Pontiac?  Dunno.

Slightly Off Topic

You all know about Project Gutenberg, of course.  Free eBooks in the public domain.  I loaded up my iPhone with a bajillion of them.

I'm looking for more.  I've hit the 'popular' stuff.  Dr Fu Manchu, Tarzan, Quartermain, Oz, John Carter, Doc Savage, Sherlock, Kipling... but then RobertaX surpises me with this guy Piper and his body of work.

Who ELSE out there that used to write real good am I missing out on?  Anyone have any forgotten gems?  If there aren't a bajillion downloads on Gutenberg you might miss some really good stuff.  Especially pulpy stuff from the interwar years.

Speaking of nutty

Do you think this Snowden guy that leaked that secret stuff has a full, two-handed, grasp on reality, or are you like me and think his grip might be a bit tenuous and he's a bit kookoo banananas, hanging from the fingertips of one hand?

It's just that some of the stuff he talks about doesn't quite add up to this outsider unfamiliar with his situation.  $200k a year for a high school drop out?  Talking like he just saw that first Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie last night?  Odd.

What was I saying?

I spent the weekend down in almost West Virginia.  Go west from my alma mater for 30 minutes and you are still in Virginia, but only just.  My nephew was graduating from High School.  So I was out of pocket, essentially, for a few days there, hanging with the fambly.

And... there was another mass shooting.  Looks like the most pertinent detail is the shooter was as nutty as an outhouse rat.  Poor guy.  Poor victims.  Wasn't I just talking about this last week?  The victims would still be alive and perp would be getting treatment if we lived in a more perfect world.

We don't have a gun problem in this country.  We have a mental health policy problem and a War on Drugs policy problem.  And yet a little under half the country is wasting energy on the wrong thing.

It's Monday

That must mean I've got nuthin for blog fodder...

Stream of consciousness?  Hmmm.   Video games with firearms in it?  Been done to death.  I have nothing to add to that California perhaps-sudden-jihad-syndrome shooting that hasn't been covered elsewhere.  I need to do some gunsmithing and hit the range.  Maybe I'll try to drag dad down there around Father's Day.  That might be fun.

Yes?

New Old Shooter

A few years back, The Beard, as I refer to him on this blog, went out and got a Ruger Mk III.  Partly because I talked about guns.  He was 27.  Since then he has bought a shotgun and a M&P and an AR. 

He now wants to get another gun.

I asked him what kind.  Which new boomstick.

"I haven't even looked, I am that far out.  I just know I want more.  For no good reason."

Ahhhhh...  Makes me smile.  He gets more libertarian all the time, too.  Of course it helps when the Leftists are all so very annoying.  I can hear one of the gun banners that happened across this blog post thinking, "This Beard guy is probably just getting guns because he is some kind of racist redneck!  He just hates black people and hates the president because he is black."

No.  I am very sure The Beard is not racist.

Monopoly

One of the memes I've been hearing the past half year from whinging leftists with regard to gun control is this:

"Government should have the monopoly on violence!"

or

"The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force."

And use this precept to justify the disarmament of citizens here and elsewhere.  A fig leaf for their tyranny.  I have an issue with that argument.  It's wrong.  Baloney.  Poppycock.  Codswallop.  Bunk.

The correct phrasing is:  "Government should have the monoply on the initiation of violence."  Initiation.  Gov't declares war.  Gov't shoots looters, and execute prisoners.  Gov't sends out cops to arrest people when there is a warrant for their arrest and they don't have to take no for an answer.

But self-defense is violent, and all living things exercises the right of self-defense.  And self-defense is a legitimate use of violence.  If Lefties want to maintain it is not, they should be made to say so.  Never accept that argument from your Liberal friends when they tell you you shouldn't be allowed to have guns.

The left has lots of cliched chestnuts like this to violate people's rights.  Like using:

"You can't yell fire in a crowded theater"

as a justification for prior restraint on one's first amendment freedom of expression rights.   Bushwa!  What if the theater is actually on fire?

69 years

If you were 17 years old, this day 69 years ago, visiting France for the first time, you'd be 86 now.  Fading a bit.

Seven Sisters

Which of the 50 states are the worst with regard to their civil rights record?  I used to whinge about them, calling them the 'Seven Sisters' and whatnot, but seven isn't really a precise number, either way.

Lessee...  California and New York are pretty bad.  New Jersey and Massachusetts.  You forget about other New England states, like Connecticut and Rhode Island.  Maryland, of course, for having no shall-issue and gun registration and so on.  Illinois was pretty bad because: Chicago, and having no issue at all, but this should be changing.

You know what state is now worse than Maryland or Illinois?  Colorado.  COLORADO!  I'd never thought I'd say that.  And in the 70's, the NRA old guard wanted to move out there and then curl up and die.  Colorado worse than Maryland. Whoda thunk it?  I can still possess 30 round mags in Maryland.

You people out west might want to set up checkpoints at the California border to keep the moving vans from coming East.  Shoulda done that 20 years ago.

I thought about this because of that first ever in the state recall petition that garnered more signatures than its target got votes in his election.  Glory.

Protip

If the Death Panels or the HHS Secretary decide it is your turn to die, be sure to get famous real quick and they will spare your life for optics reasons.

Jungle Kit

Look at the contents of this WWII era jungle kit.

I found this via lileks.com and this sort of thing fascinates me.  A little extra survival ditty bag for folks heading to the South Pacific vis England or Sicily. 

Though I imagine the atabrine tabs and bug repellent would be appropo in the Med as well.  Italy was horrible for malaria until after the war. 

( Lileks is great for vintage ephemera that gets me going.  He is a proto blog that has been blogging for longer than there has been the term 'blog'.  My first link that I saw his page was via his section on Art Frahm, but his whole site is chockablock with interesting stuff.  Regrettable foods seen in 70 year old cookbooks,  30's era matchbook covers, old advertisements, fancy document engravings like on money or stock certificates, and much much more. Check it out when you have 7 hours.)

The War Department switched to this kit during the war to achieve similar aims.  It's the M2, while the above is the M1.   And that M2 kit is pretty much similar to what they use today with modernized contents.

(Oh, and for Nuggan's sake, someone tell RobertaX about this mid 40's, Midwest radio station.  That might be right in her wheelhouse.)

Mental Illness

The country's mental health system is broken.  I don't know how to fix it, preserving the civil liberties of people yet also getting dangerous people off the street and into treatment and not abusing them with bureacratic neglect.  But I know that perhaps a federal program that makes things worse, in the form of SAMHSA, is not the way to go.

These are seriously mentally ill people.  Not just Aunt Susie, down in the dumps and wants some more Xanax from her doctor.  Facilities where are the recent spree killers belonged before their sickness spurred them to mass murder.  SAMHSA is a federal org that fights hard to get these people into an outpatient setting, where monitoring of the patients is spotty and their delusions can return when medication is missed, sometimes with quite violent outcomes.  The .gov sorta means well, and they are partly advocating for the patients' civil liberties which should really float a libertarian gunnie's boat...  But it is a government bureacracy, and we all know how effective THEY can be in accomplishing anything like 'preserve freedom' or 'save money'.    

There is bipartisan consensus to do something about this, supported by Obama and the NRA.  I hope the correct effective thing is done, rather than just a thing.  But I don't know what would be correct or effective.

Lautenberg

New Jersey's Senator Lautenberg has died.  He was not a real big supporter of our Second Amendment rights.  Chris Christie will appoint a successor. 

Kid Shoot

The kid shoot at Nancy's was fun.  I wish there was more kids there. 

I did get a chance to spend some time with one little boy.  He was maybe 7?  8?  There was a language barrier so instruction was hard.  And his form was terrible!  Nothing I could do to correct it.  Being left eye dominant but right handed didn't help.  But eventually he turned to a natural bench shooter stance/position, with his off hand at the base of the stock.  Horrible form, but dang if he wasn't a dead eye crack shot after a handful to get used to it.  Then he was hitting all the metal poppers, repeatedly, dozens of times.  His sisters were pretty good.  He did best with my 10/22 and it's peep sights.  The semi-auto nature of it, after shooting a bunch of singles, was a big hit for him.

New things I got to shoot...  Bubblehead Les's mauser with a scout sight.  JD Rush's bullpup Steyr set up for lefites.  OldNFO's Colt Mustang was a novelty.  I shot it pretty good and it only jammed once, ftf.  And I was lucky enough to shoot the flintlock musket twice.  It was a oppurtunity to give JayG the remnants of the UN helmet we blew up at a Northcoast blogshoot.

Mission

I was in on this one.

Fortunately, thanks to this alert citizen, it was easy to contain.

6 zombies retired.  No injuries to Romero teams. You're welcome.

with any luck...

Ima heading to Nancy's today for the kids shoot.