Category: The Gun Thing

Not just the guns, but all the stuff that goes with them

Headline Of The Day

Elections, The Gun Thing

Oh boy, this is priceless:

Beto Goes to Kent State, Argues Only the Government Can Be Trusted With Guns

I know the little Texas twerp is clueless;  but how clueless is that?

These socialist turds haven’t yet figured out that in America, threatening to ban a type of gun doesn’t cause us to stop buying it — on the contrary, it makes us run out and buy more  of them, in greater number and variety.  Even the ladies join in the fun:

And such is the ignorance among college students nowadays, I bet ol’ Beta-boy’s speech was rapturously applauded.  Morons.

Too Smart

The Gun Thing

We’re all familiar with the assholes who work behind the counter at gun shops — you know the ones I mean, those who want to show off how much more they know about guns and shooting than the Idiot Customer who simply wants to know whether a revolver or pistol would best suit his purpose, and who gets for an answer a supercilious blizzard of inside jokes and buzzwords which makes him or her feel like, well, an idiot.

This post is not quite about that.

As Longtime Readers know, I stand firmly opposed to the use of jargon and acronyms (although there are times when I fall into the trap myself).  In the past, I’ve written about Mystics at length so I’m not going to expound on it further, but I did notice its manifestation in an article on self-defense drills linked by Insty.

As a rule, I enjoy Ed Head’s articles, but this one falls into Trap #1:  obscure, unexplained terms and descriptions, and it falls during the very first paragraph of instruction, to whit:

The El Pres[idente] has become a competitive shooting standard, a drill practiced incessantly by top competitors. From the standpoint of an armed citizen, its best used sparingly as a test of your skill level, carry pistol and gear. To set it up, you’ll need three Option targets set 1 yard apart.

And for those people who don’t spend hours at the range, or weekends at competitions, “Option targets” are…?  these things:

One picture, and it all becomes crystal clear to someone unfamiliar with the arcana of shooting geekery.  Then Head spends a couple dozen words trying to describe the El Presidente drill, when all he needed was one of these:

And again, this time with explaining “Dot Torture*”:

Requiring 50 rounds and fired at a seemingly easy 3 yards with no time limit, Dot Torture requires total concentration, perfect sight alignment and a perfect trigger press for every one of the 50 shots. The targets are printed on a single 8.5×11-inch piece of paper and consist of circles measuring a little less than 2 inches.

And all becomes clear with:

(Actually, I prefer this one, but nemmind…)

Back to the main topic:  instruction should always — always — be delivered in a manner designed to impart the content with a maximum degree of clarity and a minimum amount of explanation.  (By “minimum”, I mean not wordy or obscure.  If a picture imparts the knowledge better than fifty words, and more quickly withal, use a damn picture.)

Shooting Times (or rather, their editors) should know better.  Ed is a very knowledgeable shooter and I agree with just about everything he says about shooting.  But he’s not well served by sloppy editing.  As this pic shows:

*As an aside, I absolutely love the dot torture drill, but I usually save it for .22 practice, whether with a handgun at 25 feet, a non-scoped rifle at 50 feet, and a scoped rifle at 75 feet.  And always, regardless of type of gun, a maximum of two seconds per shot allowed.  In a future post, I’ll show a modified version from my last trip to the range.

Gratuitous Gun Pic — Browning Buck Mark (.22 LR)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

I think the Buck Mark .22 pistol is one of the best modern rimfire semi-autos to be had.  It’s certainly one of the prettiest.  Here’s a Buck Mark Plus from Collectors Firearms, for example:

…and no serious shooter is going to argue with me that much.  Perhaps you can get a more accurate .22 pistol than the Buck Mark, but you’d have to spend a whole lot more money, because it’s more accurate than almost anyone who shoots it — and other than the high-end competition .22 guns like Pardini and so on, I certainly don’t think you can get a pistol with a better trigger  than the Buck Mark’s.

Best of all, Browning makes a dizzying number of variants to suit absolutely everyone.  I’ve either owned or at least fired most of the major types — typically, the Campers have a lightweight carbon bull barrel, and the Standards have a slab-sided heavy steel barrel, viz.:

My favorite, though, is the Plus Stainless:

I don’t have one of these brilliant little plinkers anymore — not after handing off various models to friends, my children etc.  But it’s on my shortlist, simply because I miss shooting it so much.

All that said:  field-stripping the Buck Mark should never be done in the field, as such, because unless you love scrabbling on hands and knees looking for the recoil spring and / or recoil buffer, you need to be really familiar with the Buck Mark’s innards.  Ask me how I know this.  Actually, your first attempts at cleaning it should preferably be done in a clean white room with a smooth cement floor just to make retrieval of said parts a little easier.  A Ruger MkIV it ain’t, folks.  (Here’s the back story on all the above.)

Still, I miss shooting the Buck Mark — one of the reasons I traded my MkIV for a Single Six revolver was that the MkIV wasn’t as much fun to shoot as the Browning.  (And oh baby… do I love shooting the revolver.)

And on and on it goes… if I didn’t love shooting guns so much, I’d have beaten myself to death long ago over all the stupid decisions I’ve made in the selling of them.  I need a Buck Mark, badly.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, The Gun Thing

From Stephen Green at PJM:

My AR-15 weighs about 7.5 pounds unloaded, and a bit more with a 10- or 30-round magazine filled with common .223 rounds. Or rather I should say it did, before I lost it and my banned 30-round magazines in a tragic fishing accident shortly before Colorado’s 30-round magazine ban went into effect.

Seems that people need to exercise more caution with their guns when going fishing, O My Readers, because Stephen’s isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sad story.  In fact, my own beloved Hungarian-made AMD 65 (with the doubleplusungood folding stock) met a similar fate on the Brazos (or maybe it was the Trinity) River some time ago — I’m a forgetful old man, and I don’t remember exactly when it happened;  a week ago?  last year?  sometime during the spring, and if so, which  spring?  When you get to my advanced age, the days, weeks, months and years tend to all blur together into one messy soup of half-remembered events… hell, maybe it wasn’t even an AMD-65 at all, but a Romanian SAR-1, something like this one:

Terrible thing, this forgetfulness.

Feel free to share your own tragic tales, in Comments.  If you can remember them.

Whole Lotta Ifs

Elections, Good Stuff, The Gun Thing

Stay with me on this one.

If I were many years younger, and if I were not married, and if I lived in Colorado;  and if this woman wasn’t already married, and if I happened to meet her, and if she wasn’t utterly repulsed by me to the point of shooting my fat ass — if all that, then I’d give her a big kiss on the cheek.

Which woman?  This one.

And I bet I’m not the only man who thinks this.

Not Really, Colt

The Gun Thing

I read with interest Colt’s fuck-you statement (via these guys) about discontinuing AR-15 sales to the consumer market:

There have been numerous articles recently published about Colt’s participation in the commercial rifle market. Some of these articles have incorrectly stated or implied that Colt is not committed to the consumer market. We want to assure you that Colt is committed to the Second Amendment, highly values its customers and continues to manufacture the world’s finest quality firearms for the consumer market.
The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity. Given this level of manufacturing capacity, we believe there is adequate supply for modern sporting rifles for the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, our warfighters and law enforcement personnel continue to demand Colt rifles and we are fortunate enough to have been awarded significant military and law enforcement contracts. Currently, these high-volume contracts are absorbing all of Colt’s manufacturing capacity for rifles. Colt’s commitment to the consumer markets, however, is unwavering. We continue to expand our network of dealers across the country and to supply them with expanding lines of the finest quality 1911s and revolvers.
At the end of the day, we believe it is good sense to follow consumer demand and to adjust as market dynamics change. Colt has been a stout supporter of the Second Amendment for over 180 years, remains so, and will continue to provide its customers with the finest quality firearms in the world.

The second paragraph (as emphasized) is the only one I can actually go along with.

You know, I might have been somewhat mollified about Colt’s so-called commitment to the civilian market if they’d added something like:  “To demonstrate our commitment to the consumer market, we’re going to re-introduce manufacturing of our heritage double-action revolvers — specifically, the Python, the Trooper and the  Diamondback models — and reproduce them to the same strict quality engineering standards that make them, even today, the best revolvers to be found anywhere in the world.”

(Here’s a Trooper MkII in .22LR… just because)

In other words, take one gun away, replace it with another.  As it is, however…

And an afterthought:  in the Comments section to the statement, one guy made this observation:

“If Sam Colt was alive today, there would be pure hell to pay, the board of directors would be applying for welfare.”

Nope.  If you’ve read anything at all about Sam Colt (and I have), you’d know that he was, more than anything else, a salesman — and he was constantly  in pursuit of big military contracts.  If he were alive today, he’d be as happy as a pig in muck;  and he’d be the first to tell us to go and fuck ourselves.  The current Colt management is probably just keeping to Sam’s principles.