Now, Contrast this to a Jihadist

It's not a cartoon, but a TV show that pokes fun at a major religious figure.

A foreign country, a very Catholic part of it at that, raises protests about it.

Abdul: note the lack of bomb threats. This is the civilized way of dealing with something you don't like about something you hold dear. Let its silliness speak for itself, but if there's a kernel of truth to it, stand up and take notice.

Thank you,

The Hat

Bloomberg's cry for gun crime

Whenever I hear politicians speak of guns and crime control, immediately I think that some anti-2A measure is going to be proposed...again.

Strangely enough, nothing in this article mentioned additional controls on guns themselves (as if NYC needed any more), but rather, taking efforts to curb crime through information sharing. That's a new tack.

No better way to spend part of a day off...

...than taking my first handloads and seeing how I did.

Since I'm working all weekend, the powers that be saw it fitting that I take today off. So, this afternoon, I grabbed the Deagle, 12 of my handloads, and hit the compost heap.





















I also took my Red Dot Scope to try it out. However, I wasn't really interested in shooting for accuracy today. I was more concerned as to whether or not the loads would shoot without ill effect.

So, a little nervous, I slid the first one into an empty magazine,



















Racked the slide, and pulled the trigger.

Now, according to the reloading manual I was using, 19.6gr of Vihta Vuori N110 is supposed to move a 240gr bullet a little over 1300fps. That's 200 fps more than the American Eagle loads I had been shooting through the Deagle (and, incidentally, about as fast as the Cor-Bon +P 9mm loads I used to carry for self-defense...although those bullets were over 100 grains lighter and almost .1 inch smaller than what I was shooting today).

And it was noticeable. The BOOM was a lot more authoritative, and I felt the extra pressure on my wrist.

But the gun survived. And all 12 rounds, too.

My next concern was the brass I collected. What did it tell?
















I had not overpressured the rounds. The primers were not flattened. In fact, the heads looked no different from other factory loads I had fired.

Next thing to look for: how clean did the Vihta Vuori burn? Answer: Very clean. Fouling and powder ash were the least of any other load I had ever shot in my life.

Winter is losing its hold

Temps seem to want to stay above zero--above freezing, in fact. That means walks like this one across the Delta River (well, the riverbed, anyway) will not be possible before too long. The place where I'm standing, in the summer, is often under 6-8 feet of fast-moving water.

Momma Moonbat Mouths Moronically some More

Now she's advocating Iran's possession of nuclear weapons?

I guess she really doesn't know her history that well. I mean, it wasn't that long that Ahmadinej(ih)ad called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Dropped a little too much acid during the '60s, Cindy? Killed one too many brain cells?

She calls us hypocritical for the nuke issue.

My response...a fourth-magnitude HA!

We've demonstrated responsibility with nukes for over 50 years, including facing down another nuclear power. Do you honestly think you'd get that same kind of restraint from Iran?

What's hypocritical is calling GWB a "puppet" of the neocons. This from a person who has abandoned her mission of protesting her son's death to embrace about every unrelated leftist cause under the sun?

And what about that headstone, Cindy (speaking of hypocrisy)? So "proud" to be the mother of Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan that talking to Fidel Castro's venezolano boytoy takes precedence over family matters?

Sit down and shut up, Momma Moonbat.

Some more Deaglalia

These two pics come from a fellow Deagle owner, who is very much into target shooting, showing off the effects of his favorite loads (19.8gr Vihta Vuori N110, 240gr Speer Gold Dot) when guided by a pistol scope:




















Not bad for 70 yards, eh?

Now, this next picture made me slap my forehead:















You see, I returned a comparable scope because I thought it hung over the ejector port too much. Now, if a relative expert like this fella uses that sort of setup, it ought to be OK for a relative greenie like me.

But I still have yet to try out my Red Dot scope. I'll do that soon. Probably around the same time I test out my handloads.

A hunting story

I heard this one while en route to Fairbanks last week. I was driving my client (who has recovered...the sodium imbalance was due to some drugs he takes that whacked out his body chemistry. If you take HCTZ for high blood pressure, and start feeling loopy after taking some more drugs, see if the combination is affecting your sodium levels) and his dad. Both are originally from PA, and the father has done a fair amount of hunting in his lifetime.

Once, he was rabbit hunting with a shotgun, and his dad gave him some black powder shells. He loaded them up, took his hunting dog, found a rabbit, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger.

He said the blast drove the shotgun hard into his shoulder. The dog looked up at him as if to say, "What the hell was that" and when the smoke cleared, the rabbit was pretty well mangled.

Moral: know your loads!

"Scholars" like this one scare me

A noted professor declares that the Earth would be better off if nine out of 10 people were to die.

I wonder if Dr. Pianka would be the first to volunteer. Does he really believe this stuff enough to relieve the Earth of the burden of one more person, namely, himself?

Anyone read Rainbow Six? In that story, you had professors like this one who believed much the same thing. And they engineered viruses to carry that sort of plan out.

Not exactly the best picture

The above is a bullet that one of our kids found at the compost heap. When his dad showed it to me, I said, "That's a .45." A looked at it, and concluded it must have been one of the scores I had shot over there. Firstly, there's only one other .45 on the farm (and it's a match-grade 1911), and secondly, the lack of distinctive lands-and-grooves markings on the side.

The bullet was, however, flattened on six sides, characteristic of the effects of polygonal rifling, which my stock HK barrel is equipped with.

I had always wanted to see a bullet fired from one of my guns.

And on the Seventh Day...

...The Mad Hatter "rolled his own" for the first time.

















Remember all the reloading components I bought a couple of weeks ago? Here's the end result: 20 rounds of .44 magnum in never-fired brass, using Remington Large Pistol primers, 240gr Speer Gold Dot GDHPs, and 19.6gr of Vihta Vuori N110 for the powder charge.















I need to seat the bullets just a little deeper, though. Using the American Eagle 240gr JHP (off to the right) as a point of comparison, the Gold Dots stick out just a fuzz. They load just fine into the Deagle, bolt closes on the entire cartridge, and extracts just fine, but the anal-retentive Teuton in me likes things to be in order.

Once done, I should be getting muzzle velocities of over 1350 fps. That's comparable to the Cor-Bon's I used to shoot through my 9mm. But, of course, those bullets weigh a good 100gr less.

I'll avoid picking on smaller calibers for now...

Going to do a little more .45 blasting in a couple of hours. Next-door neighbor would like to do some shooting.

And you know me...far be it from me that I would turn down something like that. Especially with all the .45 rounds I have to burn.

Our Medical System...

...while not Canadian, can still act FUBAR at times. The last five days I spent with my client doing errands, doctors' appointments, etc. He has been feeling pretty sick all week. On Tuesday, he really went south, getting incoherent, even aggressive at times. He made two visits to the emergency room before being medevac'ed out to Anchorage.

Here are some fun highlights of the last five days...

Both ER visits lasted about five hours.

Tanana Valley Clinic's "Urgent" Care Center made us wait two hours to see a Physician's Assistant who knew nothing. When he called the doctor on-call, that bastard simply told us to go to the Emergency Room. Didn't even bother checking in, didn't even see my client.

Now, here is a classic circle-jerk: When my client started really getting incoherent around 10.00pm Tuesday night, we went to the ER. They ran their tests, even put him through a CT scan and a chest X-ray, and blood work. Their diagnosis: low on potassium, has a urinary tract infection.

Bravo Sierra. We had just visited the urologist that day. He was fine.

But, we consulted with his urologist again. He said more or less the same thing (BS). Around that time, my client's sister arrived, and did not want her brother heading all the way back to Delta just to hear his doctor say go back to Fairbanks and go to the ER. So, the urologist made a recommendation at TVC. That's where we met the Double-D physician's assistant (not a busty female) and his putz puppetmaster, who tells us to go to the ER again.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! We were just there last night! Medicaid don't have deep pockets, you know, they ration out their goodies.

So, grumbling, feeling we're going in circles, we go back. To find an enormous line.

The bright spot of this symphony of errors: the urologist. He happened to be in the neighborhood, and was decent enough to help get our visit expedited. We also had a pretty decent doctor take care of my client this time.

It was enough to really get me thinking about taking care of myself better. No way I would want my life in the hands of the circus our medical industry has become.

Heh...

OK, I'm usually Johnny-Come-Lately when it comes to pop culture. I saw my first episode of "24" on a friend's computer while taking care of a client in Fairbanks.

I liked it. The best part about it is when Jack Bauer pulls out his HK.

But I'm sort of biased about those things.

Fifty-Caliber Fearmongering

Mentioning DPMS in my last post got me thinking about the .50 BMG (since at least one rifle manufacturer uses DPMS uppers in their .50 BMG rifles), and how I had promised in yet another post to share my thoughts on all the fearmongering the Prozac-popping moonbat left likes to squeeze out of the intellectual equivalent of their large intestines.

However, in the interests of maintaining a "kinder, gentler" compassionate conservatism, I will try my best to further use such epithets as "moron," "miscreant," "imbecile," "ignoramus" and the like. Admittedly it is rather hard to avoid calling them on their cranial capacity on this matter, which tends to be on par with a small soap dish.

So, without further ado...my reactions on Leftist, ah, "scholarship?" on matters concerning a very respectable rifle cartridge and the platforms used to deliver it.

Three of the more prominent sites on the web that lament the (accurately reported) power of the BMG and wring their hands over the potential dangers it can cause (people, this is the same paranoia that drove them to their shrinks when Kerry lost the '04 elections) are, naturally, the Brady Bunch, 50 Calibers Make Me Crap My Pants, and the Violated Policy Center.

Did I just break my promise to be less disparaging? Oh, I am sorry.

50 Calibers Incite My Weak Bladder (part of the Wuss Union) and the Bradys (as well as a nice little piece of propaganda the VPC put out) likes to take the "anti-aircraft role" of the .50 and blow it way out of proportion.

In the midst of all this dark fantasy, they fail to mention one thing:

In the 20-something years that BMG rifles have been in existence, not a single U.S. aircraft has been shot down.

But! There's the POTENTIAL! Yeah, and the auto industry has the potential to wipe out the U.S. population in days. Not everyone owns a Barrett, nor wants to own one (I like 'em, myself, but I cannot justify the cost of owning one myself right now), but just about every family in the U.S. owns a car. And that piece of equipment has a far worse track record than a .50.

I wonder how often these people have to change their Depends throughout the day, worrying about dangers that don't materialize?

But wait! There's terrorist and criminal elements using these rifles in other applications!

Now here, they seem to have more stuff to present. Like a .50 that was illegally smuggled out of the U.S. to be used by the IRA against British soldiers. Or the seven conspirators with a pair of .50s arrested in the Carribbean for a plot involving the assassination of Fidel Castro (now, who would really complain about that?)

But, no acts of terrorism committed with a .50 on U.S. soil to date so far. Time to change your diaper again, lefties?

Aha! They might say. There was Waco!

.50s were reported to have been fired at BATF agents during the Waco siege. We all remembered what happened there. Go rent out "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" and learn for yourself a lot of the things the mainstream media didn't report about that debacle. It leads me to conclude that if, in fact, BMG rifles were fired at the BATF, it was done in self-defense.

The Bradys like to point out the "connections with terrorism" that .50s might have had, like some seized from an extremist militia when a bomb plot was foiled. But no .50 shots fired.

In fact, neither the Bradys nor 50 Calibers Vent My Colon bother to point out any shooting crimes committed with a .50 BMG.

VPC does. In scouring reports from 1989 to 2005, guess how many crimes involving the firing of a .50 BMG they managed to find?

1,000 or so?

100 or so?

How about 10?

Try three. In twenty-odd years of BMG rifles, this is the devastating number of crimes that justifies further infringing 2A rights.

192 million arms in this country, probably less than 10,000 Barretts in civilian ownership. Only three actually used in a crime. That amounts to a huge waste of special-interest money and energy for an extremely tiny minority.

But, as I've inferred before, lefties love waste. History has demonstrated that often enough.

Friday Catblogging!

I mean, what kind of a man has a pet around named "Fluffy?"

Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking totally from the perspective of a single guy.

A gun-owning single guy, of course. In my opinion, the best kind of "cat" to own is found here.