Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Instead of featuring just one, let’s do a compendium, shall we?

Gas station robbery

Home invasion

Restaurant robbery

Church shooting

…and just for kicks, imagine that all the above had taken place in KalifuckingFornia.

Lots more dead folks, instead of just a few choirboys.


Update:  I see that Our Hero Jack Wilson used a SIG 229 chambered in .357SIG to whack that choirboy in the Texas church takedown.  Nice gun, fine cartridge (albeit limited demand).

Boomershoot 2020

Yup, it’s that time again.  (“That time” being wherein I discover, and not for the first time, that I am totally crap at long-range shooting.)

I just registered for Boomershoot 2020, so I’ll be up in central Idaho on May 1-3, driving all the way up from Texas for the three days prior, and all the way back down for the three days thereafter.  (I drive because of all the gear one needs to make Boomershoot feel less like the Somme circa  1916 only without being machine-gunned by Huns.)  I have not been to Boomershoot for fifteen years, and I very much doubt whether my skills have improved over the intermission.

So why am I going?  Well, I missed Mr. Free Market’s last trip to Scotland for the annual deer stalk in appalling weather conditions, so I need to punish myself — it’s the gunny equivalent of a hairshirt, to quell any feelings of pride and/or adequacy I may feel in my shooting skills, such as they are, and to remind me that shooting generally doesn’t take place in an air-conditioned indoor range, nor even in clement weather.

Organizer Joe Huffman, national treasure that he may be, is not responsible for the drenching rainstorms which sweep the area periodically, nor for the scorching sunshine when it’s not raining.  Nor is he responsible for the variable 20+ mph winds which sweep across the field, and which make shooting at inch-sized targets (at 400 yards) such an  ummm interesting  test of one’s ability to judge the likely fall of shot at the target.

So I’ll be acquiring at some point a new rain/sun shelter and a new shooting bench (the old ones having disappeared without trace into the mists of time during my fifteen years’ absence):

Not quite sure at this point what rifles I’ll be taking up.  The Son&Heir may be accompanying me (his work schedule permitting) in which case the Swedish Mauser will be putting in a repeat appearance*.  I hope he does make it:  he’s as good a spotter as he is a shooter — and at BS, a spotter is mandatory (unless you just want to shoot hundreds of rounds into the ground around the target).

But the rifles… previous experience at BS has shown me that hunting rifles (even ones as good as my Mauser M12) just don’t cut it.  You need a heavy rifle and a heavy barrel (the latter to handle the high rate of fire), and most hunting rifles’ barrels just overheat and the lightweight stocks don’t give you a steady shooting platform.  Here’s a pic of what I mean:

The guy on the left (in blue) wasn’t shooting but spotting for his buddy, who was an ungodly shot:  13 shots, 12 boomers at 800 yards.  The cartridge was .30-378 Weatherby, as I recall.

I don’t have anything like that, nor do I want to shoot a heavy bullet, despite the advantages that would bring in a stiff breeze.

I’ll be thinking about the problem over the next couple of weeks, but I’m leaning towards 7.62mm NATO / .308 Win in addition to the 6.5x55mm Swede I’ll be bringing already.  Here’s an idea of what I’m talking about:

All suggestions (especially from Boomershoot veterans) are most welcome.


*A brief word of explanation:  the S&H doesn’t enjoy shooting through a scope because, and I quote, “there’s no artistry  involved, Dad” and thus prefers to use iron sights at 400 yards.  Last time, he hit six boomers out of fifteen shots fired — in other words, as the 400-yard boomers are 4″ square, shooting MOA with iron sights, the bloody showoff.  Even the Fort Lewis Army snipers were impressed.  We’ll see if his 30-year-old eyes are up to what his 15-year-old eyes managed.

Social Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce would heartily approve of this iteration of his own Devil’s Dictionary.  A sample:

* “OK, Boomer” – popular, reflexive and mentally-flabby retort of retarded children who cannot formulate a proper or logical response to an argument, question or premise. A sign of belonging to a group known collectively as “Millennials” whose main attributes include oversized thumbs, limited intelligence, hysteria, extensive knowledge of modern technology but inability to use a rotary phone, can opener or rake, hair-trigger cry reflex, navel gazing, overly-high self-value acquired through a program of low expectations, and a belief that everyone gives a flying fuck about what they’re eating at any given moment.

Much more goodness at the first link above.  (Oh, and if you don’t have a copy of Bierce’s Dictionary, hie thee to the second  link and remedy that unpardonable omission immediately.  For only 99c on Kindle… please.)

About Hacks

One of the real pleasures I had while living at Free Market Towers a couple of years back was going out to the mailbox very early in the morning, retrieving the fresh edition of the Daily Telegraph, then reading the thing cover to cover while drinking my morning coffee, trying to finish it before the Free Markets woke up for breakfast.

If we had a decent daily newspaper Over Here, I’d subscribe to its print version in a heartbeat, but of course we don’t:  they’re all total shit, and of course infested with socialist hacks.

This isn’t, by the way, the modern-day meaning of the word, where “hacking” means breaking into someone else’s computer coding program, and “hacks” mean “shortcuts” or “gimmicks”.

In The Oldie days (explanation to follow), the word “hack” usually meant “journalist” — more specifically, a bad  journalist.  And in perusing the pages of a magazine I’d never heard of before (thankee, BritReader Jeff W), I found a lovely article about journalism, and journalists.

Of course, nowadays journalists are despised, and mostly deservedly so, for being hacks:  opinionated assholes who reveal their ignorance with every sentence they write (e.g. when talking about guns), and moreover, who write badly, unsupervised by editors who used to be a moderating influence, but who are now best described as “last week’s journalists” — i.e. no better than the journalists they’re supposed to be supervising.

But it wasn’t always like that.  Here’s an excerpt from the article I linked above:

It’s easy to maintain a simplistic stance if you never leave your desk. Google will reaffirm what you already know – or think you know. However if you take the time and trouble to go out and meet the people who are living through the things you’re reporting, and ask them what they think, you’ll soon find your opinions are tempered by reality. Real life is complex and contradictory. Successful columnists are often dogmatists, but good reporters are pragmatists. Regular contact with the folk they write about has taught them that life, and news, is rarely black and white.

It’s also easy to forget that journalists once had to follow an apprenticeship path before they could land a job with a prestigious — or at least popular — newspaper or magazine, that path being:  learning how to write proper journalese and prose in a small-town newspaper, and simple things such as interviewing subjects, collecting background material and in short, learning about the topics before committing them to print — all before graduating to a larger, or national publication.

It’s also worth remembering that this path seldom if ever required a university degree which, I think, stopped journalists back then from becoming part of the story:  as perpetual outsiders to the system they were reporting about, their job was to be skeptical about the topic — indeed, learning about the topic meant looking at it from all sides so that they could see through the spin being put on it by the interviewees.

Contrast that with today’s J-school poseurs, who graduate thinking that they’re qualified to write about everything, whereas in fact they’re unqualified to write about anything.  Nowadays, of course, they just parrot the spin because they literally don’t know any better.

Read the entire article:  like all good pieces of writing, it will educate you about the topic.  It will also increase your loathing for today’s so-called journalists, if that’s indeed possible.

And en passant, read a few more articles in The Oldie.  It’ll be worth your time.

Sempiterna Sinistra

So the Britishland elections are over, and Boris “The Babe” Johnson has absolutely routed the evil Communists and Europhiles who opposed him (see link for body counts).

Of course, the Left has responded to their loss in typical fashion:

Yup… anyone who opposes them and their Marxist dogma is eeevil, raayyycisss and shellfish.

Kinda like our Lefties Over Here, huh?

Fuck ’em, and the class envy they rode in on.  And to the Stout Bulldogs among my Readers:  wave buh-bye to the EU and their minions:

…and allow me to share some of our favorite 2016 vintage with you: