Quote Of The Day

Well, I guess that’s me pretty well fucked by now, what with massive ammo purchases, visits to online gun shops and hotbikerbabes.com, not to mention this here blog.  Send in the Morality Police.

Can one get a negative “social credit score”?  Because that’s what I’m shooting for [sic].

Not Gonna Happen

Oh, here’s a charming little piece.  The post heading reads:

The Seditionists Need A Path Back Into Society

…and it’s all about how the Left can make accommodations to learn to live with us, the poor misguided 75 million people who actually voted for Trump in 2020.

Whom she charmingly calls, “Seditionists.”

Now I’m not going to fisk the whole article because I’m trying to keep my breakfast pint of gin to only one per day, but let me just make one observation.  Here’s an example of Applebaum’s towering condescension:

Not all Republicans are seditionists, nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative.

Here’s a tip for The Atlantic  and its writers:

We’re not rejecting our country’s political system.  We’re protesting the fact that our votes were nullified by massive injections of fraudulent ballots in states which would otherwise have gone overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. 

Or, put another way:  if our political system — the one that the Left seems to have installed — is now going to systematically allow wholesale criminal alterations of voting preferences by the addition of fraudulent ballots:  then fuck yes, we’re going to reject it.

Until such time as you understand this, there will never — never — be any kind of accommodation towards the Left by us conservatives.

What happened at the Capitol wasn’t an “insurrection”, it was a protest.  If you want to see an insurrection — and I promise you, you don’t — just keep squeezing us:  keep calling us names such as “seditionists”, keep preventing us from getting jobs because of our political philosophy, keep talking about “re-educating” or “reprogramming” us and our children into obedience to your foul Marxist doctrine, keep shutting us out of social media, keep muzzling conservative voices, keep trampling all over our First Amendment rights in general, keep trying to infringe our Second Amendment rights, and in short, keep trying to push us out of the American society and polity.

You Marxists think that the protest at the Capitol was the bite of a savage dog (you know, the one that keeps getting teased until it snaps).  It wasn’t a bite — it wasn’t even a nip.

So keep trying to take away conservatives’ votes (like with the horrible “For the People Act of 2021”, which entrenches the wrongdoing of 2020).  Just remember the switch in the above picture.

As your own Glenn Greenwald has written:

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming
No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

Good question.

If, that is, you’re going to categorize all 75 million of us as “terrorists”.  That should be interesting.

Stopping Bears

Seems like I may have been a little too dismissive of smaller calibers when it comes to stopping bears.  Here’s one story:

The startled cubs bawled out for their mother, which came running around the corner. The woman fled into her house, but her dogs slipped out the open door. A fight ensued between the adult bear and the dogs, during which the woman attempted to scare the bear away. The woman’s husband arrived armed with a .22-caliber pistol and fired a single shot in the bear’s direction, Peralta said.
The bear ran off and collapsed about 40 yards away, dead from the gunshot wound, Peralta said. One of the cubs was found near the house and the other was found in a tree.

Frankly, this is what I call a “David & Goliath” story:  David may have killed Goliath with a single stone, but that ain’t the way to bet.  A more likely outcome is this one:

On 1 September, 1995, two male tourists were attacked by an adult male bear on a remote island in eastern Svalbard. The two tourists defended themselves with a .22 calibre pistol which proved ineffective. One man was killed, the other injured.

These, and a whole lot more actual reports of people stopping bears with handguns of all calibers can be found here.

Basically, all this stemmed from a letter from Loyal Reader Steve N, who asked the following:

I’ve never hunted anything more dangerous than ruffed grouse, but I love guns vs. bear talk.  I inherited a Marlin .444 when my dad passed away a few years back.  I shot it a bit and always thought it would be my go-to if any of these NH black bears up here needed tuning up.  Any love for the .444?

Frankly, I’ve never been a great fan of the .444 Marlin cartridge.  Compared to a .44 Rem Mag, you get a whole lot more performance (for a lot more money — .444 typically costs almost twice as much as .44 Mag — I don’t know what the current situation is, in these ammo-free times), but I’ve yet to shoot more than three rounds of .444 Marlin before my shoulder really started to hurt — I mean, worse than after firing three rounds of 7.62x54R with a Mosin M44 carbine.  That may be because of the rifle type, though:  WinMar lever guns don’t give a lot of recoil protection.

All that said, Steve, the .444 Marlin should work just fine against the smaller black bears — and as it’s an heirloom rifle, the cost of the ammo should not be an issue.  Carry it in good health.  (Just remember that the .444 is a stand-alone cartridge:  you can’t shoot a .44 Magnum in your rifle — even though they’re shooting the same bullet — as the .444’s case tapers from a wider base, compared to a .44 Mag’s straight case.)

And because this discussion is useless without a picture:

For everyone else’s benefit:  if I were starting from scratch with a lever rifle, so to speak, I’d prefer to carry a rifle chambered in .45-70 Govt around in a New England forest (or pretty much any forest, come to think of it) rather than a .444 lever gun.  But that’s just a preference on my part;  your opinion may vary, and that’s not a problem.

Monday Funnies

And so to the funnies:

Actually, she’s anorexic.

Now turning to more topical issues:

(I await the cancellation of Elmer Fudd cartoons with bated breath.)

I don’t know how this feels:

Maybe if he’s measuring the time in hours

But let’s leave all the ugliness behind, and look at beautiful things instead.

Warm Up The Engines

When I saw this linked at Insty’s, I nearly fell over.   It’s an overview of the very first bill (H.R.1) proposed by the new House of Representatives, the grand-sounding “For the People Act of 2021”, whose preamble reads:

To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.

This has to be a hoax because the bill, if anything, entrenches all the above.

Except that it isn’t a hoax.  To check on that before I posted anything, I looked it up at congress.gov, and here it is, in all its disgusting splendor.

If one — ONE — Republican legislator in either chamber votes in favor of this, they should be subject to recall in their districts and replaced with someone who understands the actual sanctity of the vote.

That’s my official position.  The unofficial position I’ll leave to your imagination, but here’s a clue:

Read more