Yeah, Maybe

This also from the American Thinkers:

There were many good reasons for the United States and Israel to finally move against Iran this month, and the need to end the Iranian mullahs’ control of their clients in nearby countries—Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, etc.—is at the top of that list.

However, if regime change in Iran also enables the Houthis to be defanged and the Suez Canal to be reopened at last—as it must—the billion-dollar-per-day transportation savings to the world economy that result from it will, in itself, have made it all worthwhile.

This isn’t about Israel and the United States alone; it’s about every developed and developing nation on earth. Everyone uses the Suez Canal; everyone needs it.

Errr nazzo fast, Guido.  I appreciate that the Suez Canal may be an important sealane, so to speak, and most certainly for Yurp and Britishland.  But is it that important to the U.S.?  I’m thinking, not.  Most of our trade comes from the Far East over the Pacific, and from Yurp over the Atlantic.  I’m struggling to think what doesn’t use either of those routes;  and if so, why would we care — other than for purely altruistic reasons, i.e. to bail the Euros out of yet another mess — to intervene in the Red Sea?

For that matter, the Straits of Hormuz aren’t that important to Magaland either;  as DJT has pointed out, the U.S. gets nary a single barrel of oil out of the Persian Gulf because we roll our own.

Now I can see why Suez might be an important military thoroughfare for our Navy, each time we want to leave the Mediterranean Sea to whack Persian pee-pee, so to speak.  But even that is not a priority, really.

Discuss.

Un-Constitutional, Illegal And Nonsensical

…and yet the National Firearms Act (NFA) is still with us, becoming evermore ridiculous, evermore illogical, and always (still) un-Constitutional.

Here’s the best history of the disgusting thing I’ve ever seen which — as with so many of the bullshit laws and bureaucracies that still bedevil us to this very day — stemmed from the diseased liberal New York mind of the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And the Act’s very vagueness of terminology makes it almost unique among our forest of laws in its ability to turn any gun owner into an instant felon without him knowing about it until the AT-fucking-F agency thugs drag him away in chains.  And said feature alone should make it legal poison, except that the Department of (alleged) Justice is too busy fucking around with irrelevancies like the Epstein files.

Kill the NFA.  Kill it stone dead, and then abolish the ATF in toto, because the government has no business in the alcohol, tobacco and (especially) the firearms business.  I might make a teeny exception for the oft-elided “E” — explosives — part of the agency’s nomenclature, but those first three initials?  X marks the spot in the back of the neck, for each of them.

Otherwise?  Line ’em up.

Self-Indulgence

Does anyone else have a gun or two that you could just call “pure self-indulgence”?  My definition thereof is a gun that doesn’t necessarily serve a purpose — self-defense, hunting, etc. — but that is just plain fun to have and to shoot, when you’re sick and tired of doing your drills and you just want to bang away for the fun of it.  (And I’m specifically excluding .22 guns because plinking is just plinking.)

The other day I was rooting around in Ye Olde Gunne Clossette when I came across an aluminum handgun case, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what I’d put in it.  So here it is:

Okay, that’s a little cluttered with the ammo.  Here it is sans the clutter:

The top gun is my much-loved Ruger Super Blackhawk 7″ barrel, in .30 Carbine, and the lower is the late Layabout Sailor’s S&W Model 15 6″ barrel in .38 Special.

I don’t know why I’ve held onto the Blackhawk for as long as I have.  It’s single action, chambered for an expensive and occasionally hard-to-find cartridge, and that lo-o-o-ong barrel makes it unwieldy.  But:  OMG when you touch off that trigger and are rewarded with a massive thunderclap and a 16″ jet of flame out the muzzle… like I said, there’s no reason to keep it, it’s pure self-indulgence.

And apart from sentimental reasons, there’s no reason to keep that battered old S&W revolver either.  It’s .38 Spec-only, I have gawd knows how many .357/.38 revolvers already, and I surely don’t need another one that’s just taking up space in the locker.  But:  the trigger is silky-smooth, made such by an uncountable number of rounds fired through it;  the gun is, to say the least, about 5x more accurate than I can ever shoot it;  and loaded with those 158gr. wadcutters as pictured, I can just shoot that thing all day — and I have, both with its previous owner (who was so generous in sharing), and by myself, when I just want to shoot something good and hard and for a long time.  In fact, it’s my “I don’t feel like plinking away with a .22, I want to shoot something bigger”  gun.  I think that every range session I’ve had with this gun has involved at least fifty rounds, and a few others a lot more.

So the two quite different guns each fill a very specific need, but both are undoubtedly an indulgence on my part.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am so going off to the range.  Just talking about them has got me more excited than Christmas.