The best argument in favor if a Taurus Judge

Dragon's Breath .410 Flame Thrower shotshells. Now I always considered the Judge to be a bit gimmicky, and these incendiary shotshells seemed that way, too - until I watched this video and saw a unique application for property defense come the End Times:

So you put some gasoline in some metal bottles (Bud Lite, anyone?) and hit it up with one of these rounds.  It seems to me that this would be pretty effective against groups looking to loot your place.  Spread the bottles around where you expect two legged varmints to congregate.

This is a very specific use case for what otherwise seemed gimmicky.  The downside is that these rounds look like they're $5 per round (ouch!).  Still, it's a use case that seems hard to get any other way.

Thoughts?  Weirdly, this seems to be illegal in Florida and Alaska, as well as the Usual Blue States.  What's up with FL and AK?

Yay, me

I guess I really am a gun guy.  The Queen Of The World got a sweet Sig P365.  Alas, we had no 9mm ammo, and the case I ordered hadn't arrived yet.

But in getting things sorted out for tomorrow's range day involved reorganizing things.  Lo and behold, I had 3 (!) 50 round boxes of 9mm.  No idea where that came from - maybe Ammoman brought it to the Southwest Florida blogshoot.

But I guess that you're officially a "gun guy" when you have ammo in calibers that you think you don't have any of.  And while my ammo hoard isn't quite up to this, it's big enough that I probably should do an inventory.

Oh, and the SIG laser for the 365 is about the coolest thing ever.  Took all of 2 minutes to install, and the laser comes on when you grip the gun.  I'll do a range report on this one.

Notes from a Texas Gun Show

 Old friends from Austin Lawrence and Dwight (You do read them every day, don't you?  Thought so.) went to the Saxet Gun Show.  I went a few times when it was in Austin and had very cool stuff like a table where the guy was hawking a free tank school.  Don't mess with Texas, baby - they'll teach you to drive and shoot a tank.

But Austin is weird, and not in the happy fun way.  The City Fathers* banned the gun show, so it went off to San Antonio.  Lawrence has a report from the show which has both good news and bad news for folks looking for guns/ammo/reloading supplies.  It's detailed and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Oh, and I didn't even know that Beard Oil is a thing.

Man, I need to get back out there for a visit and take The Queen Of The World with me.  Maybe stop in Lockhart for some BBQ as well.

* I just phrased it that way to annoy the Usual Suspects®

This is an excellent reason to finish an 80% Lower

pic.twitter.com/TqiieSGmm5

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 21, 2019

That's made of Win, right there.

What do you do with empty beer cans?

Silicon Graybeard shows you how to melt them down and cast them into an AR lower.  So you've got alcohol and firearms - the only way you could make this better is by lighting the smelter flame with a cigar.  'Murica!

Just how quiet do "silencers" make guns?

Still as loud as chain saws.  Ammunition To Go has an excellent article where they tested sound levels.

The takeaway is that I would still want ear protection even when shooting suppressed.  Highly recommended, information rich article.

Thanks to Dave who emailed me the link.

Family heirloom

Ten years ago, I posted this.  I sure have enjoyed having this.

This is my Rifle

There are many almost none like it, but this one is mine ...


When I was a kid growing up, there was a storage trunk in the basement. A trunk with a gun.

It was quite safe - not only was the barrel separate from the stock, there was no ammunition, percussion caps, or powder. But it was a gun nevertheless. Great-grandfather's gun.

I thought that it was Great-Great-Grandfather's Civil War musket, that he had carried with Sherman through Georgia. Kind of interesting when I lived in Roswell, where Sherman had burned the mill. To this day they hate him - maybe it was less burning the mill as it was packing the women folk up on trains and sending them to prison camps in the north. Don't think that Great-Great-Gramps had anything to do with that, but you never know.

Last week when I was in Washington DC, I stopped at my older brother's house to see them. I drove it back with me because after all, I'm the shooting nut of the family. I hadn't seen it for thirty years, and so was surprised when I unboxed it.

This is no Civil War rifle. It's a hunting rifle. Percussion cap, second half of the nineteenth century, but it's clearly not military. There are no markings on it, other than an engraving of some birds.


So dad and I had a chat on its history. He found it in his Grandfather's house, back in the 1930s. He thinks it was originally his Great-Grandfather's rifle. Says he was told that it took the last deer in Elk county, Kansas (one of the probably thousand rifles that took the last deer in Elk county, no doubt). Family tradition is that there's a ball stuck in the barrel. I don't think that I'll poke around to find out about that ...

It's sadly abused. The stock is broken in a couple of places, likely when the barrel was removed. My plan had been to get it repaired, when I thought it was a Civil War rifle. Now, I'm not sure. I'll probably reattach the barrel so that I can hang it on a wall, along with its powder horn.

Historical value? Probably none. Family value? Immeasurable, at least to me. My family never came from money, and this put food on the table, nourishing past generations of the Borepatch clan. It's earned a place of honor.

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life.

Thus, I will learn it as a brother.

Welcome home, brother.

UPDATE 25 July 2009 13:52: More here and here.

I think I need some emotional support

Seen on reddit/The_Donald.

Now this is quality April Fool's Day satire

Every Single Bumpstock in Nation Lost In Boating Accidents:

U.S.—In a rash of tragedies all across the United States, every single bump stock in the nation was tragically lost in various boating accidents earlier this week.

Coincidentally, the bump stocks have just been banned by the Trump administration. Since all the bump stocks have been destroyed, it's now impossible for the ATF to confiscate them or fine people who did not destroy them. 

"Well, I guess our job is done," an ATF representative said. "We were gonna have to make sure people complied with this unilateral executive order, but now I guess we can just harrass gun owners for other stuff. Worked out pretty nicely for all of us, I think."

It's the Babylon Bee, so you know it's funny.

Not a recommended approach for carrying on your motorcycle

Woah.

That does look like my Road Glide (well, it looks like a Road Glide from a similar year as mine), but I wouldn't recommend the leather tank cover holsters.  You'd have to move the guns to your actual holsters if you parked and had to go to the Little Harley Room, if you know what I mean.  That'd be violating Tam's "Stop Touching Them" rule.

And you'd definitely have to be in an Open Carry State, and one where the PoPo takes Open Carry laws seriously.

Win gunnie stuff

Jamie emails to say that Bulk Munitions is giving away a new .50 cal steel ammo can with stuff.  The contest is open to people in the lower 48 states only (Sorry, Rev Paul and Glen).

Canada retires Lee-Enfield after more than a century of service

That has to be a record.  Man, I love my No.4.

How do you go out of business selling ammunition during an ammunition drought?

The last 7 years have been essentially a continuous panic buy season for ammunition.  While it's gotten a little better the last year, before that it was empty shelves for years as every cartridge box got grabbed as soon as it left the loading dock.

So how to explain this?

The text in the lower left hand says "Auction of Pierce Munitions".  So how did Pierce go Tango Uniform selling ammo during the biggest ammo shortage of all time?  They slept with the enemy:

You might be a little miffed if you found out a gun or ammo company was donating serious money to virulently anti-gun politicians’ re-election campaigns, right?

Of course, companies have every right to donate to whomever they want, so too we have the right to spend our money with whomever we want.  And the makers of “Ted Nugent Ammo” probably aren’t going to be on that list after you find out they donated $7,500 to N.Y. Governor Cuomo’s campaign fund.

Yep.

ALBANY (NY Daily News)— National pro-gun groups have largely holstered their checkbooks since the passage of Gov. Cuomo’s tough gun control law early last year.

…Surprisingly, the biggest donation, $7,500 from Buffalo-based bullet maker Pierce Munitions, went to Cuomo in June of last year — six months after the gun law passed.

A little further digging found that their check, (numbered 1594 for those keeping track) “ANDREW CUOMO 2014, INC.”

That was August last year.  Customers walked away, and they shut their doors.  You can bid of the last bits of their carcass if you have the dough.

Hat tip: Ralph via email.

Seven guns in one

An advert from when I was 6 or 7.



The past is another country, foreign in its strangeness.  This is from the same era:



This is what we talked about at school.  Try that these days ...

Motorcycle windscreens vs. shotguns

Interesting marketing.  And they're honest enough to show that their screen doesn't stop bullets.

Interesting firearms shopping site

Liana emails to point out a pretty interesting site, Find The Best which is putting up a firearms comparison analysis engine.  A couple days ago I put up a bleg asking what .22 bolt action rifle is good for teaching newbies.  That was an interesting test for the system, which lets you select a whole bunch of criteria to find what you're looking for.

Pretty neat actually.  And the results can be sorted different ways, for example by price:

And that led me to one that made me go hmmm:

Like I said, pretty interesting.  I hadn't even known about this little rifle, and now I'm thinking of maybe getting it.  Because what I did know was that I think I need a beginner's .22 rifle, and Find The Best helped me zero in on what I was looking for.

They have a decent set of search criteria to filter with.  You could use this to pick a carry pistol, for example.  They also have a neat feature showing all of the gun stores and FFLs near where I am.  I didn't know that there were six within 5 miles.  Heck, that's walking distance.  The have a place for user reviews, although as a new site there aren't a lot.  I might go through and put links to my range reports there.

I think that the site could be improved by questionnaire for new shooters where it asks a series of questions that can help set up filters.  For example, how large are you (small/medium/large)?  How mechanically inclined are you (a little/some/a lot)?  What type of clothes do you typically wear (fitted/loose)?  The idea is that a newbie won't know much about shooting but will know the answer to questions like these.  Then the filters can provide a starting point.  A good filter for a large, mechanically inclined man who wears baggy clothes could include a full sized 1911, for instance.

But this is nit picking.  I spent rather a lot of time fooling around at Find The Best.  Interesting place.

You're welcome

Today's Failure To Fire is epic.  Make sure that you hover your mouse for the added sweetness of the mouse-hover joke.  Like I said, you're welcome.

But "epic" is the mot juste.  It reminds me of some of the best of the Calvin and Hobbes strips, where Calvin played the role of Sam Spade.

The artistry extends beyond what you'd expect of a "comic strip" and the highfalutin dialog and narration jack the humor up far beyond what you'd expect from [ahem] a simple "comic strip".


Well played, gentlemen.  Well played indeed.  I, for one, will watch the development of Failure To Fire with keen interest.

Glock: 1.2 Million gun back-order

I took the dogs to the dog park, and it was cold - almost Yankeeland cold.  There were just a few of us watching the dogs play.  Then a guy showed up.  A guy wearing a Glock jacket.

I struck up a conversation, and it turns out that he's in Glock's marketing department.  We had a long and very interesting conversation.  Glock's Smyrna, GA plant builds 30,000 guns a month, and is running flat out.  Their two Austrian plants are jointly building roughly 100,000 guns/month for the American market.*  That's about 130,000 guns a month.

They have orders in hand for 1,200,000 guns - that's nearly a year's production.  A year, running all their factories at 100% capacity.

He also mentioned that they have a very interesting set of new models that they will be introducing in June.  I actually promised not to let the cat out of the bag here (yeah, I'm being a jerk) but it has a model that I might actually consider buying.  Even though (as Kim du Toit used to say) they're ugly, plastic, and made by furreners.

* They actually import them as parts - big bags of recoil springs, etc - and assemble them here.  That saves something like $150/gun in import duty.

Failure To Fire is a hoot

You do read it every day, don't you?

You know, I've never been called a "dumbass" by the FBI.  Sounds like something to add to my bucket list.

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