Because I just have to say it...

The continued sales success of the Taurus Judge and its spinoffs is the most damning condemnation of the general firearms and ballistics knowledge level of the average American shooter that I have ever seen.

There; I said it. I feel cleansed now.

The strangest thing happened here yesterday...

Water fell out of the sky.

I heard this used to happen sometimes, but it hasn't here in a long time.

Anyhow, it messed up our plans to go see the giraffles and the heffalumps. I think we'll try again today.

More Pet Peeves..

More stuff that sets my pet peeve to snarling and lunging at the end of its chain:

"While you were poring over those old manuscripts, I made you jump by pouring soup over your head."

"I baited the hook and waited with bated breath for the fish to strike."

"If you walk straight down that dark alley, you'll wind up in dire straits."

Editors and Proofreaders (ha!) of America, I thank you in advance for your attention to these matters.

Overheard in the Office:

RX: "These people going on about gun safety regulations are always worried about small children. And adults, which are like small children..."

Me: "Except usually drunker."

RX: "...and you have to worry about them putting small parts in their mouth, too."

Meanwhile, Sebastian flips out a little over a vintage ad for the Iver Johnson Safety Hammerless revolvers, the one that has the girl snuggling up with an old "Owl Head" top-break like it was a Strawberry Shortcake doll.

As I mentioned in his comments section, it was a different world back then; safety hadn’t been invented yet. Her daddy’s about to tell her to put the gun down and run down to the shops to get some laudanum for momma and a couple of ceegars for da. It’s a thousand wonders the human race survived through those barbarous times, no?

Nowadays, of course, the little girl could tell teacher that daddy made her hold the gun, and festivities would ensue...

There are squibs, and then there are squibs...

...and here you thought a squib load in your .38 was a bad thing.


(H/T to CTONE.)

Mystery AFV...

Over at Lagniappe's Lair, this video was posted...



...and trying to figure out what manner of AFV that is is killing me.

The video's blurry and, as usual, the vehicle looks like it's from the Joad Army, being piled with the worldly belongings of pax and crew, and that makes it hard to get a good look at the silhouette. Long, shallow glacis; low-profile turret set kinda rearwards... The gun's too small for an MBT's main gun, but too big for most IFV's. The skirts and road wheels aren't right for a BMP-3...

I am totally tortured.

EDIT: Wait. It looks like a Swedish CV90. Nevah mind.

QotD: Liberty edition...

From Mark Alger, because it's my blog and I can have as many Quotes of the Day as I want to:

LIBERTY IS A BINARY CONDITION like pregnancy. You can't be "just a little" pregnant. You either is, or you ain't. There's no shades of being free.

QotD: Economics Edition...

I found these here:

"Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from."
– Thomas Sowell

"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace."
– H. L. Mencken

Bring the noise...

Thanks to the drought, the firing line at Knob Creek this fall was a constant dust cloud, instead of the usual mud pit. I got a few shots during a cease-fire:


Check out that Vickers!


When the line goes hot, the wall of sound is unbelievable. It's like a physical presence; it fills the air so there's no room for your voice, no matter how hard you try. It's a constant roar of money being turned into noise, occasionally punctuated by a cannon or the RRRRRIIIPPP!!! of a couple-second-long burst from a minigun tearing up targets downrange like the finger of an angry god.

Mm-mmm.

Breakfast at Cafe Pretenchou with Shootin' Buddy. Roomie, who had been up all night reprogramming warp cores, came along.

The food was good, as always. The sleep-deprived entertainment was pretty droll. She was singing in the car on the way back, new lyrics to "If I Only Had A Brain", but kept faltering at the lack of an easy rhyme for "repugnant".

Gilded lillies.

Did you know that the ancient Romans painted their statues? That's right; those plain white classical marble statues you know so well were originally dolled up in technicolor like a Third World Jitney cab.

This is a roundabout way of explaining why I've never been a big fan of engraved guns. Once I'd got to the point where I understood what went into getting the steel and the wood just right, with flat flats, round rounds, even joins, and clean corners, it seemed to me that engraving just got in the way of appreciating the craftsmanship of the actual gun itself.

Up to now, the only engraved firearm I've ever looked at with lust in my heart was a deeply engraved Broomhandle Mauser I saw at a gun show in Lawrenceville, GA some 15-odd years ago. That was before Breda posted pictures of this funky side-by-side fowling piece the other day...

Marketing fail.

So apparently there is a company selling new secure entry setups to banks. Something of a cross between an armored fish tank, an airlock, and a prop from a dystopian science fiction movie, these entryways allow one person at a time to enter, and don't unlock the inner door unless the entrant is cleared by a built-in metal detector and the outer door has been closed.

All issues of legal CCW aside, this looks like a tremendous hassle. Further, rather than communicating safety, it tells me that my branch is located in such a dangerous area and is in such constant danger of violent robbery that they deem maximum-security techno-gadgets from the set of Minority Report to be a worthwhile expenditure, so I should probably bank elsewhere if I don't want to wind up as an extra in the climactic gun battle from Heat.

Did nobody run this by marketing?


(H/T to Unc.)

My world turns with an audible click...

William Gibson used to be a writer of science fiction. In the '80s, writing on a manual typewriter, he coined the term "cyberspace" in the near-future trilogy that began with the book Neuromancer. His second set of three books, beginning with Virtual Light, was set in an even nearer future: our world, but balkanized and seemingly suffering from some global depression that had emphasized the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, with some prototype nanotechnology thrown in to give it that "SF" flavor. And this most recent trilogy is only "science fiction" in the sense that we are right now living in a pretty science fiction world.

I just finished reading the third book in that set, Zero History. It was a little poignant to see the word "iPhone" on the page of a William Gibson novel...

What caught me even more off-guard was something that happened on page 213:

"Sleight had arranged for us to have a look at a garment prototype. We'd picked up some interesting industry buzz about it, though when we got the photos and tracings, really, we couldn't see why. Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas"

"For what?"

"The new Mitty demographic."

"I'm lost."

"Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who are actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another."

You expect this from Mike Williamson or Larry Correia or even Oh John Ringo No, because they are, when it comes down to it, us. They're as immersed in the internet gun culture as their readers are. But William Gibson? He's an auteur from the Pacific Northwet who whiffs faintly of patchouli at times.

I was a moderator at GlockTalk almost ten years ago when one "Gecko_45" showed up and posted a bizarre thread that has now injected a piece of jargon so deeply into the cultural zeitgeist that it has bubbled to the surface as an actual plot element in the latest novel by probably the most literary and laser-gun-free SF author writing. Weird.

Anyhow, fantastic book. Recommend!

Boys will be .55 caliber antitank rifles...

The Rifle, Anti-Tank, .55in, Boys shown below was on the table of the guys from Ohio Ordnance Works, home of the semiauto M-240 and regular attendees at our local Indy 1500 gun shows.

The nearly pristine Japanese Type 99 light machine gun slightly behind it and to the left can be yours for the low, low price of $12,500!

BONUS! Boys Anti-Tank Rifle Training Film!



The stuff you can find on the intertubes...

Steampunk and Powdersmoke...

Want to increase your carbon footprint by ten percent at a rate of about four hundred rounds a minute? Did I see some solutions for you!

Just in case the brass "Bulldog" Gatling from U.S. Armament didn't turn your crank, if you'll pardon the pun, there were some lovely Gardner guns in .45-70, too.


U.S. Armament is apparently also the company to which you should turn if you have a yen for an adorable breechloading 50mm Krupp mountain gun. And it's pre-1899, so no paperwork necessary, as long as you don't hanker after firing anything other than solid shot.

(The 50mm uses fixed ammunition, like your .22LR only much bigger, instead of a separate bagged powder charge and shell. I'm pretty sure that not even Old Western Scrounger has ammunition, so it would be a reloading-only proposition...)

Love for sale...

Something they were selling at Knob Creek: brand new Anzio Ironworks 20mm bolt action rifles. For those days when a wimpy little .50 BMG won't cut the mustard...

Overheard in the restaurant...

Continuing the theme of me not dealing well with change:

Me: "Huh. Waffle House has 'wraps' now. That's just not right."

SB: "They're responding to market forces. I thought you liked that kind of stuff?"

Me: "I had a hard enough time getting used to non-smoking Waffle Houses. Now they have 'wraps'. What's next? A sushi bar? It ain't right. You kids today with your raccoon coats and your phone booth stuffing and goldfish swallowing. Get offa my lawn!"

I had steak and eggs, medium rare and up, with hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, peppered, and cooked crispy. You don't eat a wrap at a greasy spoon. It ain't right.

A point of baseball order:

I know it's very trendy and fun to talk about Barry breaking the economy, but it's worth noting that the closer doesn't get the Win when he comes into the game with a lead.

The game's been going on so long that I can't remember the starting pitcher, but I think it was either Wilson or T. Roosevelt, and they had a strong bullpen full of middle relievers...

Overheard in the parking lot...

Me: "Yeah, the minivan over there belongs to a family that I guess was here to see their kid graduate from basic or AIT or whatever. He was in his class A's... I didn't realize that the wars had gone on so long that we were down to the Volkssturm. He looked 14!"

SB: "He was probably 19..."

Me: "He looked like he was barely old enough to be out of Webelos and he was a PFC!"

You know you're getting old when...

Are they trying to turn me into a paranoid militia kook?

"We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate."

And, hey, it's legal. You have no expectation of privacy in public, as the 9th Circus just reminded us. By extension, there is no problem with an FBI agent standing outside your door and tagging you like a migrating harp seal every time you want to run to the 7-11 for a bag of chips, and warrant be damned.

Are they trying to start a fight?

Led spaghetti.

MattG has been on a hunting trip out in Children Of The Corn country.

While out there, he got to take a field trip to the Hornady plant.

Neat-o! I'm jealous.

"Hey, Doc, this horse don't seem to be recoverin'!"

"Well, shoot it in the head again."

Dig faster! You'll get out of that hole eventually!


(H/T to ThunderTales.)

Don't threaten the rednecks.

My friend Jenny writes on the Battle of King's Mountain. (In which battle every native East Tennessean had a distant kinsman who was a participant. Just ask them.)

It's definitely worth a read.

Han shot first.

Or did he?

Let's see what happens when we splice the Zapruder film back together in the correct sequence:

"What time is it, boys and girls?"

"It's machine guns and great big explosions time!"

That's right, it's Knob Creek time this weekend. I'll be headed south today with Shootin' Buddy so as to hopefully take in the Patton Museum at Fort Knox again (and this time not forgetting my camera,) before going to the shoot proper tomorrow.

While I'm at the gun show there, I'm hoping to find

...a rapid-fire variant of lower part of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a type of firepower component that was outlawed in America for a decade before then-President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress allowed the assault-weapon ban to expire in 2004.

...because that would be awesome. Hopefully it'll include the shoulder thing that goes up.

Then I'll mutter and seethe in inchoate rage, as I hear and pass along strange, racist conspiracy theories about socioeconomic factors that are far over my little peasant head, what with its prognathous jaw and hint of an occipital bun... Or at least that's what Will Bunch would have you believe I'll be doing there.

Shootin' Buddy likes to refer to Sunday's NPR entertainment as "liberals sitting around and feeling better than you," and that's the exact same vibe that comes out in the writings of Bunch, a guy who writes about the hinterlands west of the outer suburbs of Philly (and their inhabitants) with the same mixture of patronizing pity and repressed loathing that characterized the journals of Victorian Brits roaming the backwaters of the Zambezi. Want another sample?

And on that human level, the common denominator I found time and time again was fear -- whether it was folks whose jobs vanished when they were in their late 40s and early 50s who turned to Glenn Beck or a group like the Oath Keepers to figure out who to blame, or people seeking an outlet for their "discomfort" over a rapidly changing America that had so suddenly placed a black man with an unorthodox life story in the Oval Office. But in a group setting, raw fear can get masked by bravado crossing the line into hate.

I half expect him to tell his readers that they need to help these poor befuddled haters, that they need to Take Up The... er, White Man's Burden, as it were.