Trash is Diverse

I see people on the web promoting a badly-chosen and destructive phrase: “black fatigue.”

It is attached to stories of ghetto blacks doing ghetto things, like calling for white people to be killed, beating up restaurant employees, and being forcibly removed from airports.

It’s a phrase that has an appeal to anyone who has witnessed, or been a victim of, ghetto behavior by blacks. I have had some issues, myself. I had a black woman come up to me on the street and tell me white people were nasty and that she couldn’t stand us. A black kid tried to take a fishing pole away from me and ride off on his bicycle. A young black man called me “bitch and “honky” at church. A black man moved to my side of a crosswalk to spit at my feet. I’ve been called “white boy” by racist black kids. I understand the weariness.

It’s a stupid phrase, though. What people really have is trash fatigue.

My grandfather was a circuit judge in Eastern Kentucky. A black woman who should have been warned moved to one of the counties where he worked. This is a very trashy county. It’s a place where people go out in public with bed hair. Where illegitimate kids and welfare scammers are all over. A place where people shoot each other over the kinds of arguments children have.

When I was young, I assumed my grandfather was kind of racist, because nearly everyone around him was, but maybe he wasn’t. He mentored this lady and supported her efforts to establish a practice.

Some moron or morons burned down her house.

That’s exactly the kind of thing “black fatigue” victims complain about, but the perpetrators were white.

Do I know they were white? No. I know the black population there amounts to less than half a percent, though, and I have heard people from that county and and nearby counties share their negative views of “niggers” with no shame and every expectation of approval.

Okay; American black culture is a mess, black people commit much more crime per capita than whites, and racism against other groups is accepted in most black areas. These things are true. We see a very disproportionate number of American blacks causing trouble. But the same things are true of other groups, like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans. They’re also true of white trash.

Trash comes in all colors, because it’s DIVERSE.

When you use the term “black fatigue,” you make it sound like trashiness is exclusive to blacks, and other groups are above it. You push people in the direction of plain old racism. You motivate them to treat all blacks like dangerous, parasitic losers. That is evil.

I can never know for sure, but there are probably at least a million black people in America who are much finer human beings than I am. Not the highest bar to clear, I admit. On the other hand, there was my dad’s wealthy white law partner, who once asked a South African boat handyman, “Can I go to your country and shoot niggers?”

This was a guy who was second in command of a prestigious firm in Coral Gables. After he and his wife forced my dad out, he was the top dog. He represented prominent clients like Florida Power & Light, Anheuser-Busch, NASA contractors, American Express, PPG, and Nabisco. He’s dead now. His wife is still there.

Trashiness, social standing, and financial status are three different things.

I managed to find his death page at Legacy.com, and no one, not even his wife and son, has left a message. There is no obituary. Not a surprise. He was completely selfish and without morals. I never knew anyone who liked or respected him. I certainly didn’t. Not after I was maybe 10 years old.

There is a fluff biography on the firm’s website. It’s pretty cold. I don’t think his wife wrote it. I wrote my parents’ obituaries. When your own family doesn’t write an obituary for you, it’s not a good sign.

He used to run around with a couple of guys named Robinson and Hicks. They drank and fished in the Bahamas. My dad’s partner and Robinson owned a yacht in which my dad held an interest for a time. No fond messages from Robinson or Hicks at the Legacy page. Nothing from their wives. The firm’s page says my dad’s partner was a mentor. None of the “mentored” wrote anything. Nothing from his brother.

Robinson was disagreeable person and not very bright. He was included in the partnership to save my dad’s partner money. Hicks was a little odd. I was told he had notebooks full of nude photos. I never saw them. Miami has a disgusting annual event called the Columbus Day Regatta, during which boaters raft up, cavort naked, and have sex in plain view. My dad claimed Hicks had a telephoto lens he broke out every Columbus Day.

When my dad’s partner wanted to buy something for the boat, my dad asked him how he would get Robinson to agree, and the partner said Robinson would do what he told him. He said Robinson was stupid.

His own dog didn’t like him. He had a German Shepherd named Yancy, and Yancy used to walk around his house with one side against the wall, trying to get as far away from him as he could. I guess he got some beatings.

He got what he wanted by sacrificing better people, so when he died, he had money, but no people. Must have been a bright day for ambitious associates at the firm.

Actually, he may not have had that much money as he should have, so he may not have gotten what he sold himself for.

My dad invested and denied himself, so he had a solid net worth. His partner’s wife was also a partner, so they had two incomes, but they led a more self-indulgent lifestyle. My dad said they blew their money. Ski trips and so on.

In 2015, the partner upgraded his 1978 yacht to a 1999 model which probably cost him $400,000. It’s listed right now for $349,000.

In terms of spending power, $400,000 is close to the value of the 1978 boat back in the 1980’s when the partnership bought it, and the new boat is only 4 feet longer. In 2015, the partner would have been about 69, his son was out of the house, he was qualified for full Medicare and Social Security benefits, and he and his wife were working, so he shouldn’t have been nervous about the future. Given all the cutthroat things he did to enrich himself, he should have been able to drop a million on a boat without flinching. And he did like big status symbols. He was always talking about how nice other people’s bigger boats were.

Either he was watching his money, which was uncharacteristic, or he wasn’t doing well enough to buy something more expensive. Or maybe Robinson was out, and he had to pay for it by himself. Still, if my dad had been in his shoes, almost 70 with a double income and no dependents, $400,000 wouldn’t have been the best he could do in 2015. When you’re 70, the years during which you might have to support yourself without working are not likely to exceed 25.

If you’re 25, spending a given percentage of your net worth is a lot riskier than spending it at 70.

Singlehandedly, my dad paid almost the same amount for a boat, corrected for inflation, in 1988, and it was not a problem.

To return from my digression within a digression, it’s amazing, how the partner vanished without any evidence that he meant anything to anyone.

I think God just gave me some revelation. Psalm 37 says this:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.

I used to think this meant God would eventually take the wicked out, but maybe that’s not the whole story. Maybe it means everyone is relieved when the wicked die, because they are tired of them and glad they’re gone. Maybe it means people move on without them as quickly as they can, treating them as though they never existed, except in cases where circumstances force them to keep praising them.

My dad’s partner is gone, and I don’t think anyone misses him. He was rude. He was dishonest. He was ruthless. He told my father he would swear lies against my mother in their divorce. I doubt he had a single friend.

I don’t think his wife was crazy about him. Their relationship started when she was an associate at the firm and he was married to someone else. Marrying a partner certainly advanced her career. She became a partner and was able to combine her firm voting power with her husband’s. That’s how they got rid of my dad.

In the Nineties, he took up with a flashy receptionist named Donna, and he and his wife separated. He told my dad he was dissatisfied with his wife because she had stopped working out, if you can imagine such a thing. They got back together, however, and my dad’s understanding was that the reason was that he wanted to maintain his lifestyle.

I never heard of him doing anything for anyone else. I mean not one single thing. I never heard anyone say anything nice about him. They laughed about him, because he was often unintentionally funny, but no one admired him at all.

Anyway, I think “black fatigue” will become a popular phrase, and it will be destructive to an already-polarized nation.

As I always say, I recognize two “races”: the children of God, and everyone else. Those are the only races anyone should care about. Identifying with whites or blacks or Americans or anything other than the children of God is immature and counterproductive.

My white status is temporary, like my American status. There are no races in heaven, and there are no Americans there. Citizenship ends at death. My status as a son of God, if I hold onto it until I die, will last forever.

I hope to be in heaven eventually, and if I make it, I will be with former blacks, Asians, and every other type of person. I want to be with people who are like myself and share all my beliefs and desires, and those things do not correlate with biological race.

Liberals Triggered

One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.

The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.

There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.

Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.

While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.

A company called Rare Breed started making FRT’s, and the ATF got all pouty about it and went after them. They started telling customers IT WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD IDEA to give them their triggers because YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T COMPLY.

Far as I know, nobody has ever been charged with a crime for owning an FRT. Maybe some felons have. In any case, there are no news stories about FRT owners being charged en masse.

The ATF went after Rare Breed, but now that Bondi is in charge, we’re all friends, so you can keep your FRT and even order new ones.

I have always wanted a device like this, mainly because the ATF doesn’t want me to have it. Being told you can’t have something makes you crave it. I would love to have hand grenades and dynamite, even though I would be afraid to use them and even to have them in the house. If I had some, and Florida suddenly dropped its permitting laws and so on, I would lose interest in them right away.

Also, the bans seem unconstitutional to me.

Do I have a practical use for a machine gun? I don’t think I ever will. Some people obviously do. Some people live in Detroit, for example. I don’t think I’ll ever need one, but it would be neat just to have one.

If I had one, I would probably shoot it once and then put it away. It would be hard to watch money shooting out of my rifle barrel at that speed, and accurate shooting is way more interesting to me than just blowing stuff apart.

Is it legal for me to have an FRT now? Not in my opinion.

The federal FRT ban is now dead, but the most logical reading of Florida’s hysterical post-Stephen-Paddock anti-bump-stock statute is that FRT’s and all other devices that could make guns fire faster are illegal. If that is true, then such devices are even more illegal than the guns people pay an extra $200 to own, because you can’t pay $200 and receive an FRT permit. There is no such thing.

The maximum fire-enhancement-part penalties under Florida law are a $5000 fine and 5 years in the pen. Oddly, the state-imposed penalties for owning factory-made machine guns without ATF approval are much worse.

A bill undoing the restrictions has been introduced in the Florida legislature, but it’s not going anywhere right now.

So what impact will the new DOJ settlement have on the nation? Put simply, a whole lot of citizens are now legally entitled to own machine guns without paying huge sums of money or joining a federal registry that can be used later for purposes of targeting and confiscation.

You can say these guns aren’t machine guns if you want. You can cite federal law. The truth and the law are often in conflict.

To me, this seems like a tiny, malformed step toward enforcing the Constitution. It is enforcement of the spirit, not the letter.

When the Second Amendment was drafted, it used the term “militia.” While it did not state that militia membership was required in order to qualify people for 2A protection, it did imply that 2A applied to arms suitable for military use. In 2025, that means full auto. You don’t fight a war with semi-automatic rifles. A militia with semi-automatics would be a joke.

If we followed the Constitution, people would be allowed to buy machine guns without obstruction, as they were until 1934. Whether it’s a good idea for ordinary people to own machine guns is a separate issue, and in any case, that genie appears to be out of the bottle.

The playing field has changed a lot. Every little idiot in our ghettos now has a stolen Glock pistol with an extended magazine and an illegal switch that converts it to full auto. These switches are very easy to get. I could print one today. They’re not going to disappear from our streets. Good citizens, however, are still stuck with whatever the feds and their states allow. It’s an asymmetrical situation, and in areas that don’t permit FRT’s, it will probably get worse. In areas where they are allowed, FRT’s could do a lot to balance the scales and discourage criminals.

An FRT could be a lifesaver for a person who has a ranch by the Mexican border. Mexican criminals of the most worthless sort trespass on border ranches carrying machine guns.

FRT’s might also chill federal tyranny to some degree. James Madison made it clear that this was a vital purpose of the Second Amendment.

My guess is that a huge number of people who don’t already have FRT’s and were afraid to get them are about to buy them, as fast as they can be delivered.

What a country we have. Almost completely polarized. The right wing demonized by the left to the point where a big percentage of leftists would be murdering us in groups in the streets if they thought they could get away with it. To top it all off, we are now no longer able to control the proliferation of automatic weapons. Any kid in Compton can get a Glock switch for a few dollars, many, many good conservative people know how to modify semiautomatic rifles in an afternoon, and forced-reset triggers are now available to millions of people who were afraid to buy them last week. People are storing more ammunition than ever because of the Obama and covid shortages. The powder is dry. We’re just waiting for someone to light a match.

I support our right to own and carry guns, including machine guns, because I hate bullies. I hate those who torment the innocent, and I am not fond of their enablers in government. On the other hand, I am distressed to know that I live in a world where guns are needed because there is so much hate.

Christians know Yeshua will come for us, and we will be transported to his wedding, which will take 7 years while the people who remain on Earth slaughter each other and die from other causes. Then we will return, and there will be a millennium of peace, abundance, longevity, and good health. I doubt anyone will want a rifle during the millennium. I wish that were true now.

This world is disgusting. It is full of pain and unnecessary malevolence. My life is easy and pleasant, but I am still sick of this place because of the suffering and malice I see around me.

The other day I saw a story about a baby elephant that was killed by a vehicle. The mother was so heartbroken, she refused to leave the road for hours. For some reason, that disturbed me very deeply. I thought about the nature of a diseased planet where things like that happened.

A few days back, I went to Walgreen’s. I got out of my car and locked the door. Unexpectedly, this made me think about the way human beings treat each other. I was just going to a store to buy protein shakes to help my wife breastfeed my baby son, and I had to take miscreants into account on the way to the door. I live in a world where strangers are looking to hurt me all the time, for no reason.

I recently saw a video. Two young men, probably in their mid-teens, went to a modest house carrying guns. They opened a door from the patio. Someone inside screamed. There was shooting. One young man dropped like a stone, and his “friend” ran off while trying to pull a gun from his own pocket. The dead criminal was shot just after he turned to run.

Generally, you can’t shoot a criminal who is running away, but this one was ostensibly still armed, as was his companion, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t turn and fire, so I have no sympathy for the one who was killed.

On the patio, there was a little plastic swing on a rope. A baby swing. There was a little plastic Jeep for a toddler to drive. These creatures saw those things and still chose to go in with weapons so they could steal…what? A wedding ring worth $75 on the street? A couple of 10-karat bracelets from Walmart?

I got so angry, I left a comment that was over the top. I said, “That little bastard got what he deserved.” I shouldn’t have called him a bastard, but other than that, I stand by what I said. He was despicable. He was worthless, by choice. A man can make himself worthless by choosing to be irredeemable. The Bible calls human beings worthless more than once. How can there be a world where young men can enter houses with guns and go after babies, tiny children, and women?

I hate this place. This world. I always say leading a peaceful Christian life here is like taking a luxury vacation in a miserable, revolting place like Mexico and being unable to return home. No matter how good things are for me and my family, there is devastation and failure all around us, and we can’t avoid witnessing it.

While I am here, I intend to go armed, and I fully support other peoples’ rights to fight off bullies. I support the death penalty, as God does. I support long prison sentences for cruel criminals.

If you need an automatic weapon because of your particular situation, I’m glad you can get it. I would rather see 50 vicious punks put in their graves than one innocent person become a victim.

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

Woke up in my nice Sam’s Club memory foam bed. Prayed in tongues and prophesied for 90 minutes. Grabbed my beautiful son, who was in prime morning-baby mood, and messed with him while he burbled with joy. Noticed that he had pooped on his romper during the night. Took him to the laundry room, put him in the special seat in the utility sink, and rubbed him all over with a hot, soapy washcloth while he grinned and tried to eat water drops that got close to his mouth.

Diapered the baby, put the poo items in the washer, threw out the carefully-wrapped diaper, and handed the heir apparent over to mom, who was thrilled to have him back.

Went to the living room and ate a gorgeous toasted bagel with cream cheese, slices of Bermuda onion, smoked salmon also from Sam’s Club, and decaf with too much cream and sugar. Watched a Top Gear clip and made fun of the British.

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

Went on Tiktok wearing a Dodgers jersey. Small confused dog also wearing Dodgers jersey. Screamed in torment about the L.A. Dodgers visiting the White House. Called two talented baseball players DEI hires. Ripped jersey off self. Tore dog’s jersey off so roughly she should be cited for animal cruelty. Announced her plans to burn her jerseys, sparing one that belonged to a player who missed the White House visit because he hurt his ankle. Complained that things should be different, because this is the Age of Aquarius. The demons she worships are letting her down. Imagine that.

Two people. Same world. Same country. Same week.

Leftists are the people who have planted their perversion-celebrating antisemitic flag on joy and love. The people who supposedly do life right. The rest of us–the Gomers and Goobers–are supposedly the miserable potato eaters who don’t know what we’re missing because we’re too stupid and too busy committing incest.

Polls from left-leaning organizations say people on my side are happier, better-looking, and even less mentally ill than the snowflakes, even though they make more money and tend to be more educated. Even the polls are deluded!

Red life is wonderful. The South is the most-fun place there is. I’m missing out on so much hatred and fear.

A young guy bought the house across the private drive a few years back. He bought it from a great older couple, Russ and Sally. Russ played basketball at LSU. As Southern as they come. Heavy accent. He was an ignorant incest-committer who could not read. No, actually, he was a very smart guy with a math degree. He made his money selling medical stuff because the job market for mathematicians isn’t all that great.

The young guy has a land-clearing business. I just wrote a letter for him, telling some authority or other to let him park his diesel grapple, truck, and equipment trailer on his lot. He has a wife and three kids. The kids zip around the property on a quad. We get along great. He came over here and moved problem trees for me without being asked or paid. In fact, he asked permission.

So far, neither of us has left the private non-HOA subdivision wearing black PJ’s from Urban Outfitters and carrying bottles of pee to hurl at the cops. None of the residents of these two properties key Teslas. We haven’t screamed at the sky.

I hang out with my wife and baby son. We pray. We occasionally host overnight visitors. I shoot in the yard. I like running around in the utility cart and working with the chainsaws and the tractor. My lot is so big I have to use a cart to get around, and I have to use the phone to communicate from one end to the other. I write on my blog. I brew beer.

We must be doing something wrong. We could be living it up in Times Square or any neighborhood in Seattle, pooping on the sides of police cars, setting fire to ourselves over Ukraine, calling for the murder of all Jews in Israel, and telling our son he’s a girl.

The other day I told my son I had assigned the male gender to him. I’ve told other people. It gives me a laugh. I tell him not to be a fruit or a leftist when he grows up.

If we’re doing so many things wrong, why is life so good?

My buddy Mike has a son who married a leftist. Their marriage is an equal partnership, so it’s really a matriarchy. They are not interested in our white, European-looking, colonialist God.

Mom is a fake vegan who sometimes eats things like cheese. Dad plays along when he’s in the house. They have two small girls. The last one came in seriously underweight at birth. That’s what happens when you don’t eat meat. Vegetarianism is very, very bad for the unborn and for children. Even our left-leaning medical establishment says so. Know what you’re supposed to eat while breastfeeding? Protein. Look it up.

Guess what breast milk is, by vegan standards? An animal product. We’re not really animals, but leftists think we are. Anyway, they think breast milk is okay for babies, but as soon as they’re weaned, it’s time for sickly white fluids concocted from things like oats and soybeans. Soybeans are toxic until they’re cooked, and they’re full of female hormones, but okay.

Mom and Dad bought their first baby a lesbian costume. A grey sweatshirt with a rainbow on it and a pair of masculine-looking jeans. I would rather have God strike me dead than let me put homo clothes or girls’ clothes on my boy. It astonishes me that there are parents pushing their kids to adopt abomination. A baby is literally better off dying in the crib than going to hell. There is no purpose in having children to fill up hell.

They used to get mad at Mike for using words like “she,” “her,” and “girl.” Like the first baby’s sex was a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. Now they find themselves using these words themselves. I wonder if they cudgel themselves later and sleep in hair shirts made from fake hair. They have even put dresses on the baby.

When the son found out my wife and I were having a baby, he told Mike he wanted to know what we were planning to do to help him cope with life under white supremacy. No joke. My plan is to make sure my son knows there are only two races: God’s family, and everyone else.

They worry all the time. They live in fear. They have little free time. They are unhappy. They are angry at good people.

Life here gets more peaceful all the time. We don’t worry about the future, because someone is planning it for us. I call our house the House of Love, because it’s true.

Here on the blog, I express a lot of annoyance, but that’s not reflective of the atmosphere here or my general attitude. I don’t go around in real life fuming about the world, and I do not hope conservatives start shooting our persecutors. I would like to be raptured. I want to be elsewhere when people on my side look for payback.

Mike’s son and his wife are normal. More typical of this age than my family. That’s terrible.

The centrifuging of society has progressed to an extreme degree, and Satan’s smug children are getting heavily concentrated at the bottoms of the tubes. Their contempt for God’s children is deep and impenetrable. Their hatred is hotter than ever. The spring of future violence is compressed almost to its limit.

Today I read about a poll. About 55% of Democrats said assassinating the president was at least somewhat justified. Elon Musk? A paltry 48%. We’re talking about cold-blooded murder, if it can ever be correct to say leftists have cold blood. It boils all the time.

Democrats are now showing up at hate events wearing hats like that of Luigi, a video game character. They symbolize agreement with Luigi Mangione, the cowardly liberal nutwad who murdered an innocent insurance executive on the street.

Imagine this happening during the last century. What if this were 1964, and Republicans were wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Oswald the rabbit, showing how happy they were that John Kennedy’s brain had been splattered all over his wife’s dress and expressing their hope that more murders would follow?

Couldn’t have happened.

Here’s irony: Luigi hats feature a big “L” on the forehead. What is that the universal symbol for?

Couldn’t be more appropriate. Satan is THE biggest loser in existence, and his children are losers. I mean that literally. Satan is incapable of being blessed, but he is a curse magnet. A black hole for curses. They can fall in, but they can’t get out. His kids are the same way, but curses can’t stick to real Christians.

As usual, things are even worse than I thought they were. How can this be sustainable? If a very comfortable majority of Democrats admit they think it would be good to see the president murdered, and it’s okay to wear a hat celebrating the killing of a husband and father who was no threat to anyone, how long can it be before Democrats start traveling in armed mobs, shooting everyone they think MIGHT be a Trump supporter, true Christian, Zionist, or Jew?

I see that we are lucky leftists hate guns, because it hinders their progress. If conservatives wanted to put death squads on the street, we could do it today, but angry liberal men tend to be weak, soft individuals who don’t know guns work. When you see them running around in their conformist black pajamas (because black is the color of love and joy), you can’t help noticing that their necks and their wrists are often about the same size. They are taking a long time to prepare.

I think Democrats are becoming like Muslims and the Irish-Americans who funded the IRA. Some are willing to become terrorists. The others are not, but many of those who are not are willing to support terror in private.

Let me digress. I learned something interesting the other day from a secular historian. In the early days of Christianity, people dressed normally at funerals. They wore cheerful colors. They knew they were celebrating people’s entry into heaven. They started wearing black because the Catholics and the Orthodox, who ran pagan organizations pretending to be churches, adopted pagan funeral customs. For pagans, death was terrifying.

Now it’s like every leftist event is a funeral. A funeral for civilization and love. They even root for the end of humanity. They think human beings are an infestation, and the world is like a house that needs to be tented for termites.

We are what gives the world purpose. Without us, it would be better to destroy it and save animals suffering.

It’s important to maintain perspective. If you don’t check leftists out once in a while, and your own life is easy and peaceful, it’s not hard to forget that the ship is sinking.

Life is Easy for the Cute

My son is still alive, so apparently letting me take care of him for up to two hours at a time is not as dangerous as his mom thinks. I am not a tiger. I do not eat my young.

Things are going very well. He is ahead on every obsessive-mom metric I can think of except for height, and he has over 20 years to work on that. He is fatter, stronger, and smarter than most kids his age.

We are changing pediatricians, as I have probably written before. The old Nigerian guy we picked has such a thick accent even my wife has no idea what he’s saying. He is completely dismissive of breastfeeding, and he appears to be receiving bribes from formula companies, because somehow free formula mysteriously appears in his office, and he gives it away.

My cousin told me the doctor should be giving us height and weight percentiles at every visit, but he doesn’t. I pushed him to do it, thinking it was a simple thing he knew how to do, but he had to go to his computer and find the same website I would have used.

The last time we went, a well-dressed white lady was at the clerical window having a too-long conversation with the clericals. I thought it was odd that someone with nice clothes and clean shoes–and no children–would be in a pediatrician’s office in Ocala, and I soon learned that my suspicions were well-founded.

That happens more and more as I get old.

She was some kind of industry shill, and she was arranging something with the practice. Maybe she was a formula shill, or maybe she gets paid to put doctors together to make mutual referrals. Maybe she was pushing Ozempic for fat babies. I don’t know, because they never mentioned a product.

I should have gone outside to see which series BMW she drove.

The baby is fine, but there is constant tension between the mom way of doing things and the proper, correct dad way. Mom wants him to lie on his back and have paid servants massage his extremities and feed him milk from a 24-karat bottle. Dad wants him to begin SEAL training.

He has had feeding problems because Mom taught him to sleep in her bed and to breastfeed while covered in multiple layers of clothing. He decided she was a pacifier to help him sleep, so he didn’t make much effort to take anything in. He just lay there snoring with one hand on Mom to make sure she didn’t try to escape. The Mom alarm. The ankle monitor of baby moves.

Last night, I got Mom to talk to a friend of mine who breastfed two kids, and the friend set her straight. She said he needed structure. He needed to be in bed at night, ignored except for necessary feeding and changing. She said the lights needed to be out at night, and the baby needed to be uncomfortable so he would not fall asleep at the nipple. She said to take the romper off so he would be a little cold.

My wife is convinced that our son will die if we expose him to 75-degree air without two or more layers of clothing, but as I have repeatedly told her, crib death is caused by heat, not cold. My friend backed me up, saying her kids sleep best at 69 degrees. It looks like a lot of mothers have killed their children by wrapping them up like little moon astronauts.

I don’t think my wife fully understands that in America and Europe, “room temperature” generally means 68 degrees. Florida has given her a skewed perspective.

He is trying to talk now, although it would be a pretty big stretch to say he has formed words. When he says something that sounds like a word, I repeat it back several times, thinking there might be a chance. And there might. Who knows? It has happened to others. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months. Strange that I turned out to be so much smarter than she did.

My sister, I mean.

Between my sister and me, it is not a close race.

We have an appointment to have our son’s mouth looked at, to make sure he doesn’t have either of the common deformities that make it hard to latch onto nipples. I’m sure he’s fine. He has opened his mouth plenty wide in the past, and today while he was in a good mood, I pried him open to check, and I couldn’t find any issues.

Once the appointment is behind us, it will probably be clear that we, not a deformity, are the problem.

I should not complain about my wife being overprotective. There are a lot of moms out there sitting in bars while their mothers or strangers look after their kids. Then there was Barack Obama’s mom. Enough said about her.

We have had a number of diaper blowouts. We have used bottles to get more milk into him, and apparently, it works. He has developed a gut.

My wife hated my idea of bathing him in our laundry sink, but when he started having blowouts, I started tossing him in there, because it was the best way to confine the mess and get rid of it. We got him a mesh seat that just fits in the sink. I added a spray nozzle to the faucet. Now my wife loves it and prefers it to the plastic whale-shaped tub she bought him.

I think the tub is no good because it just dilutes the filth without getting rid of it. You put the dirty baby in, the filth sloughs off into the water, and then you dry him off, leaving filth residue all over him. The spray nozzle sends filth down the drain.

We dump him in the seat and go through an elaborate procedure to get his clothing removed and into the washer and his romper removed and into the trash. The poo never touches anything important.

The whole business was my idea. The sink. The spray nozzle. The procedure. Everything. I’m a Southerner. We hate poop.

The baby loves doing it my way. He can’t get enough of the sink. He loves being hosed with warm water.

My wife saw me washing him, and she was amazed that his leg didn’t come off when I grabbed it and used it to lift him so I could spray his back and butt. His expression didn’t change at all. She had been overdoing the gentleness, like parts were in danger of coming loose.

I lift him and blast him right on his Mongolian blue spot. Mom didn’t know these spots existed. Pretty much everyone who isn’t white has them at birth, and on some people they’re permanent. Our son has a big blue area all across his vast rear end. My wife didn’t know Africans had these spots, but of course, they are harder to see on Africans.

I feel pretty smug about the sink. Experience has vindicated my ideas several times, and it’s always sweet.

He has gotten way better at pooping. He used to scream like crazy every time he had to go, but it’s much less tumultuous now. Apparently, he had something called dyschezia. It means you’re pushing hard from above while clamping shut from below. It’s a coordination problem. Now he just growls like a Rottweiler during each push, and everything moves along as it should. It’s like, “GRRRRRRRRRRRR!! GRRRRRRRR!! Ooh! OOOH!”, and then a big smile. He goes through this a number of times during any given poo, so I try to wait until he looks happy. That suggests he has finished and he is ready to hand everything off to me.

Mom thinks he should be changed while he’s still growling or screaming, because she thinks poo stings his rear end. I think that’s wrong, because he has no diaper rash and no broken skin, and he sleeps just fine after pooping without cluing us in.

I just made him wait for a change, and he calmed down. He was grinning and cooing with joy while I fixed him up. I call that another score for Dad.

This week he is falling out of love with the pacifier. His hands are taking its place, which is convenient for us. We don’t have to run for a nice, sanitized pacifier. He can just ram his nasty, filthy fingers in his mouth for long intervals of free amusement that also build up his immune system.

He’s much more fun now that he laughs and smiles and tries to have conversations with us.

I did not have much use for kids before he came along, and I thought babies were gross (which is actually true). I knew some people believed that people who didn’t care for kids shouldn’t have them, but I figured I would love one if he was mine, and of course, that is what happened. No problems at all.

I also worried that I would love my children too much, and that is still a concern. Sooner or later, you have to let them walk outside and face the world by themselves. I have been thinking he will eventually need to go to day care from time to time just to learn how to socialize, and that will be tough for me. Will there be bullies? What about all the sick kids with snot and vomit all over them? Will I be able to trust the attendants?

One thing is for sure. I will never let him spend time in a facility where a man works. It is not normal for a man to want to be around tiny children that belong to other people. I don’t want homosexual pedophiles anywhere around my son. If we ever walk into a place and see a fruit wearing foundation and glitter, we will turn around and walk out.

Pedophilia appears to be much more common in men, and I don’t think that’s because statistics are flawed.

Now that my son reacts to me more, I enjoy interacting with him more. Before everything started to come online, I liked being with him, but after a session got to a certain point, it had more to do with duty than enthusiasm. I wanted his brain to develop. I wanted him to know he was loved. I wanted him to have physical activity so his coordination would progress.

I still haven’t gotten him to shoulder a rifle yet. Give me a month. I am working on it.

Come Get Some, You Bucktoothed Punks

I managed to get some shooting time in yesterday. First real effort since the baby showed up and took over.

I am trying to put together two very nice .22 rifles: bolt and semi-auto. I got myself a Tikka T1x MT-something-or-other and a 16″ 10/22. Both short. Both threaded. I got a silencer to use on both.

I used to think the .22 was hopeless for accuracy, but things aren’t as bad as I thought. You can get pretty good results if you spend enough money on the gun and glass and you also test a whole bunch of ammunition to see which type the gun likes. I should be able to pop squirrels in the head, fatally, pretty consistently at 35 yards, possibly out to 50 with practice.

Two long months ago, I tested three cartridges in the Tikka: Eley Benchrest Outlaw, CCI Sub-Sonic 40-grain, and cheap CCI Blazer 40-grain, not to be confused with 36-grain, which everyone hates.

I posted photos here. I shot 4 10-shot groups of each ammo at 35 yards. They all did pretty well, but the CCI Sub-Sonic ammo gave me a flyer I didn’t think was my fault, and the groups were just…ugly. The average size would have been 0.515″ without the flyer, but I doubt the ammunition’s consistency. I don’t want flyers maiming squirrels.

The Outlaws gave me three very good groups and one very bad one, so again, consistency concerns.

The Blazers shocked me, coming in at 0.555″ with beautiful groups and no flyers. I don’t know why a particular load would produce larger but more beautiful groups than another load.

Of the three types, I liked Blazers best. Good enough accuracy for squirrel heads, plus high velocity for more damage.

Yesterday I tried Eley Match, Wolf Match, and Eley Subsonic. Eley is probably the top name in match .22 ammo.

People think Wolf is a Russian ammo company. I have seen people claiming this is not true. They say Wolf buys ammo from all over the world and puts its name on it. I have seen claims that Wolf Match is really made by a well-known company that makes high-grade stuff for matches. At least one vendor claims Eley makes it. The idea is that somehow or other, the QC is lowered for the Wolf product, so it costs less. I don’t know if it’s true.

Long story short: Eley Match 0.429″ with a flyer I may have caused, Wolf Match 0.520″ with a flyer I probably didn’t cause, and Eley Subsonic 0.429″ with ugly, stringy groups.

Sadly, I forgot I was supposed to shoot 10-round groups, so I shot 5 rounds at each bullseye. That means I have to do it all over again.

Also, the measurements are not totally reliable. With these targets, I found it difficult to be sure where the centers of the bullet holes were.

So far, Eley Match looks like it may be the most accurate thing I’ve tried, but Ammoseek’s cheapest price is 31 cents per round. I think I paid 5.5 cents for Blazers, and they were faster and nearly as good, and they have hollow points. I will repost the Blazer target.

It’s important for me to remember that if a group size is x, it means the bullets landed within something like 0.5x of a theoretical point where perfect shots would have landed. If my test group size is 0.6″, then I should generally be within maybe 0.4″, not 0.6″, of the theoretical point. If I can figure out where that theoretical point is with a given gun and load, and I can rest my gun and take quality shots, I should be able to nail squirrels within something like a third of an inch of my points of aim. That is very good accuracy for the purpose.

I dithered around a lot regarding the Ruger’s scope. The Tikka has a very expensive (for squirrels) Athlon Helos on it. I also have rimfire scopes that cost under $100, and most people go cheap. I figured I should get a real scope because the rifle was pricey and I wanted very good performance. I wanted tactical turrets and reticle illumination.

I ended up ordering an Athlon Argos for the Ruger. It has capped turrets, but that’s okay for a hunting rifle which is very unlikely to see serious target shooting. The Helos has better glass. The Argos is lighter than the Helos, and I thought that would be nice while lugging the Ruger around.

The Ruger’s scope is not here yet. Once it gets here, I will have to go through the ammo tests again.

I may be able to get out and try to kill some squirrels this week. I sure hope so. I don’t know if I can reduce their numbers near the house, but if I can’t, at least I can say I got revenge.

Back when it was starting to get really hard to buy ammo, I loaded up on .22 rounds. This was before I made any effort to check accuracy. I ended up with a billion rounds of so-so ammunition. That’s okay. I have pistols, after all. Mini-mags will do just fine for pistols. I think I should load up on Blazers once the accuracy tests are done. That will probably be next week.

Mini-mags and my other non-stellar ammunition will work just fine on coons and other annoyances bigger than squirrels, so it’s not like they are only good for paper.

There’s a Person in There

It has only been 4 days since my last report on my son, but he seems to have changed a lot during that time.

When we brought him home, he was a jiggly ball of flesh that pooped and yelled. There was a little more to him than that, but not a whole lot more. He wasn’t totally incapable of thinking. He was smart enough to decide he liked bottles better than his mother. He did have a very limited number of modes, though. Angry mode. Hungry mode.

Actually, I think that covers it.

This month, everything changed. At first, we got glimmers of smiles. Now, he has periods of obvious, overwhelming happiness. This is nice, because in the beginning, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of positive emotions. He has also developed a very strong attachment to his mom.

I guess it makes sense that newborns aren’t the most positive people on Earth. It doesn’t do a newborn a great deal of good to tell the world he’s happy, but if he’s upset, everyone around him will try to fix his problem.

His negativity was a test of our patience. You want to be upbeat with your newborn, but it can be trying when you’re getting somewhere between zero and 4 hours of sleep a night and every time you interact with him, he screams as loud as he can, sometimes for quite a while. When the positivity starts to show up, you feel weight dropping off your shoulders. You realize how hard you were working, contributing virtually everything to the relationship and absorbing the very real pain of loud crying.

He screamed when he was hungry. He screamed when we changed him. He screamed when we bathed him. He screamed while he tried to poop. He screamed for other reasons we never figured out.

When a baby is screaming, you feel pressed to fix him, but often, you don’t succeed. Repeated failure leads to a feeling of powerlessness, like the feeling you get when you try to contact an airline for customer support. It’s discouraging, but you can’t quit.

At least with a baby, you know the problem isn’t that an entire industry is designed to cheat you.

Here’s an interesting thing I never thought about until this week: adults lose their voices, but babies don’t. They keep right on going. If I screamed as much as a baby, I’d lose my voice in an hour. How do they do it?

Earlier this week, we noticed that he was smiling a lot more than he had the week before. Yesterday and the day before, things really ramped up. Now he lights up with joy. His whole face shines with it. And we are finding out how to make it happen.

His favorite thing is the diaper game. You flop him onto the changing pad, and while he’s lying there, you take a new diaper and put it over his face. Then you pull it away. Then you put it back. Then you pull it away. He thinks this is the greatest activity there is. You put the diaper on a face that looks moderately happy, and when you pull it away, the smile is wide, the eyes are shining, and he is wiggling in ecstasy.

It also works with other objects, but right now, the diaper is king.

Yesterday, he started whacking his hanging toys in a much more vigorous, prolonged, and determined way. He must have gone half an hour the last time.

He has started trying to talk. It’s not impressive. He’s not ready to give elocution lessons. But it’s definitely an effort to speak. No words, obviously, but he is trying to express himself.

He thinks his mom is the greatest. She started spending more time with him in order to deal with some feeding issues, so they ended up lying in bed together a lot. He can’t get enough.

His new thing is the mom alarm. He sleeps next to her with one hand against her side to make sure she’s always there. If she breaks contact, he wakes up and and lets her know how he feels about it.

Their closeness has caused a problem. He wants to sleep with her all the time. I don’t always know what’s happening at night, because I conk out and sleep with a recently-developed dogged determination. I learned she has been letting him lie next to her all night.

Babies are not supposed to sleep in their parents’ beds. This is a new rule. New by my standards. They sometimes get crushed and suffocated. Also, adult beds are softer than baby beds, and it is believed the lack of support can cause crib death by making it harder for babies to breathe.

You’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs. You can’t even let them sleep on their sides. Because our son has been sleeping with Mom, he has gotten used to sleeping on his side. He also rolls onto his stomach to sleep.

I didn’t know this was happening, or I would have done something.

Now he hollers when we put him in the bassinet, and regardless of where he is, he may try to roll over. His mother wants to let him be, because moms spoil their kids. I have to be bad cop parent and put everything right. Now Mom is the parent who makes life cushy and cozy, and Dad is the guy who shows up to ruin everything.

We have to put him in the bassinet from now on, except when everyone is awake, and he is going to yell until he realizes he’s not going to get his way. Mom thinks it’s bad to let him yell. Dad knows it’s important for him to learn that yelling won’t always get him what he wants. He has to learn he can’t have everything his way all the time. Otherwise, he will sleep however he wants, and we could wake up childless one morning.

Mushy thinkers believe babies this young can’t be spoiled, but it’s very obvious they can, so I pay no attention to them. My son can’t be allowed to run the house. He can’t be encouraged in manipulating us.

When my sister was tiny, she used to tell adults off. She would put her hands on her hips and lay into them. The family thought it was funny, and they encouraged her. She became a hopeless brat and manipulator.

She always have to have her way. If you don’t do what she asks, she makes you miserable until you do, even if it’s something unimportant. No one can stand her. She has no real friends. Both of her parents said God should take her if she wasn’t going to change. She lost her law license, and she will never get it back. She has a felony conviction, as well as some felonies that were hushed up. She was disinherited more than once. That’s what can happen when you let your soft heart put your child in charge.

When a baby is very, very young, it’s important to get up and act when there is trouble, and sometimes its cries indicate real problems. This conditions you to get up and bounce around the house like a frantic pinball every time the baby isn’t happy. That mindset has to be recognized and destroyed. It’s not appropriate after the first few weeks. Eventually, your child has to get up and bounce around when YOU make noise. Your child has to fear you.

The “milestone” guidelines are not always helpful. They say a baby should not sleep on his back until he’s a year old. They say he should not sleep on his back until he’s at least 7 months old. They also say he should not sleep on his back until he can roll onto his stomach and back onto his back by himself. Who is right?

I think this kid will be rolling over both ways, at will, within a month. He is extremely strong and vigorous. His neck is like a steel spring. He kicks like a mule. The only thing preventing him from walking is his inability to balance.

He keeps exceeding expectations. I don’t know whether this is normal. I didn’t know it could happen. It must be a big blessing, but here we are, first-child parents, tabula rasa, and it’s one more challenge we have to figure out without much help.

What do we do when he is fully able to decide how he wants to sleep? We can’t stand next to the bassinet from dusk till dawn, turning him over repeatedly. Is it okay to tie his hands? No idea. If he can roll over, and he’s only 4 months old, should we let him do what he wants?

We have to find out.

Personally, I have doubts about the whole crib death approach. My best guess is that demons cause it, and medical science will never admit that. I have seen demons, Yeshua has visited me, and I have received miracles, so my outlook is different.

It’s very common for demons to attack people in their sleep. For some reason, demons love to stand beside beds or at the foot or head. It’s common for people to wake up and see them. I’ve seen a lot of them. My mother saw one. You probably know people who have seen them.

One thing they love is to shut off your air and paralyze you. When they do this, you may not be able to move, speak, or breathe. I have never been unable to breathe during these events, but I have had a very hard time speaking. Sometimes when these attacks occur, you will see demons in your dreams.

Many years ago, in a dream, I saw a beautiful young woman. I asked her who she was, and she said, “I’m a demon.” She pointed her right hand at me, and I could barely speak. I don’t remember how I worked it out. At least she told the truth.

I’ve told about the funniest demon visit I received. It happened here in this house. I woke up and saw a strange shape over the bed. I can’t recall exactly how it looked, and it wasn’t clearly defined, but I could tell it was feminine. It arched over the bed like a crane.

Demons don’t scare me at all, but I really hate them. When I saw this thing, I was furious. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I said, “Get out, BITCH.”

I doubt Yeshua ever said that to a demon.

I think crib death is caused by spirits that overcome weak and/or unprotected babies. I don’t think it could happen here. Since my wife and I have been together physically, spirits have not come to the bed.

This boy is developing fast, so I have to get on top of things. I thought I had a long time to prepare the house. Maybe I don’t. Kitchen knives, chemicals, tools…what if he starts getting into stuff next month?

It’s nice to see his systems come online, even if we’re not ready for all of it. He smiles when we change him. He likes his baths. He can see us and follow motion at least a couple of yards off. We’re getting a much-needed return on our investment. It will be great when everything is operational.

I just heard some squawking. Looks like someone is up and ready to give orders and present demands. Maybe if I stay in here just a little longer and stay really quiet, Mom will change him before I go check on him.

Another Day Free of Furious Pansies

Those heartless, selfish, entitled conservatives. I don’t know how much more I can stand.

Today my conservative neighbor really outdid himself. He texted me out of the blue and asked if he could send a wheel loader over to pull a stump out of my yard and move it to my burn pile.

The nerve of some people.

This is the same MAGA creep who showed up the morning after a tropical storm came through, cut a downed tree in two places, and moved it off my driveway.

How I miss Miami, where people showed up to do thoughtful things like parking their cars in the yard for parties and destroying the grass, stealing Xenon headlights and oriental rugs, and yelling at me for leaving my truck in the street for 30 seconds.

I miss the kids who egged my car and shot a ball bearing through the rear windshield of my truck. I miss the great neighbors who carried their trash across the street to put it in my pile.

I really miss the salsa fans who had loud parties in spite of noise ordinances, keeping me awake through closed windows until past 2 a.m. on weekend nights. It was great how they never cleared this with their neighbors or invited us. Being taken by surprise made it extra special and showed us how important we were to them. Those thoughtful, altruistic Hispanic customs always make for tranquil neighborhoods.

Is it racist to say it seems like everyone wants to live among white people? I guess it is, because they also want to live among people from Japan, Korea, and China. Leaving East Asians out must be racist.

Hispanic and black NEIGHBORS can be fantastic. Hispanic and black neighborHOODS, not so much. No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.

I think the biggest problem with white neighbors is our tendency to form HOA’s. It shows why white people were the ones who invented Nazism.

It wouldn’t really make sense to count me as white when it comes to HOA’s. I’m a Southerner, and as far as I know, every last one of us hates HOA’s. But many of us can’t tell the difference between a front yard and a junkyard.

My current neighbor has a land-clearing business, so big machinery goes in and out from time to time. He put a couple of pole barns up, and he parks things under them. I could not care less. Anyone stupid enough to complain about a friendly neighbor who has a wheel loader and a backhoe should be barred from owning real estate.

We had a long conversation today. Due to my misanthrope status, he knows the other neighbors better than I do, and he gave me the lowdown on them. I already knew the people to the north were mentally ill because they had Biden signs, but he says they are hard core. The guy across the road from them is a jerk who flipped out because the land-clearing guy trimmed trees that hung over his property. He also trespassed to see what the land-clearing guy was doing on his own land. I believe he also had the Biden virus.

The wheel loader guy wants to park a big truck on his land at night. Ask me if I care. I thought he was already doing it. He is going to have to appear before some kind of county board or other. He wanted to know if I would write a letter. Of course I will. If he wanted to have a steady flow of big trucks up and down our road, I would not be happy, but going in and out once a day? Who cares?

We discussed the subdivision that borders us on the south. They are giving him hell because he sort of trespasses. The subdivision consists of little hobby horse farms, and there is a clear area that goes around it like a moat. It’s a bridle path. For many years, a family in the subdivision has been letting his family cross the path to enter their property to visit and swim.

He also drove small vehicles onto the path and went around looking for debris he could move for them, free of charge. He sometimes dumped the debris on his own property.

Now they’re mad, and they expect him to drive a mile and go around a bunch of properties to visit his friends. I think this is stupid. You never turn down free debris disposal. They should sign a paper saying he doesn’t have an easement, and they should let him continue to go over there as long as he owns his house. As things stand, he is not planning to move debris any more.

Has an HOA ever done anything good? They certainly do stupid things. The other day, I saw a story about an HOA that forces everyone to keep their garage doors raised. So no tools, I guess? No belongings allowed in garages?

The HOA president is a reasonable guy who always wants to make peace, but it seems some of the blue-state transplants who live there have not figured out that this isn’t Massachusetts.

While we were talking, I found out the loader guy is raising pigs. I had no idea. I told him we had deed restrictions that barred raising pigs. First time he had heard of it.

He said he kept them on mulch to kill the stink. It must work, because I’ve never smelled anything. I told him I didn’t care if he raised elephants as long as they didn’t smell. I also said he shouldn’t tell the other neighbors.

I was actually glad to know he had pigs, because if times get hard, pigs will be necessary. They are the cheapest source of four-legged protein. If they can be raised here on the QT, it could keep my family fed some day. Although I suppose deed restrictions won’t mean much if things get that bad.

He has three kids. He told me they don’t get to use screens. No video games. Brilliant. They’ll develop their brains instead of just their thumbs.

I invited my neighbor to come use the shooting berm whenever he wants, and I am probably going to hire him to remove some stumps. I should take them some brownies to show gratitude for the help.

What are people in blue cities doing today? Trying not to make eye contact with perpetually-enraged pansies looking for reasons to bully them. Waiting for oil protesters to have their hands unglued from the roads they use to get to work. Being arrested for defending themselves. Sitting in lawyers’ offices, trying to find ways to prevent their kids from being taken away and pumped full of wrong-sex hormones.

I don’t know if I will ever fully appreciate how blessed we are.

Rodents Will Fall Like Rain

Baby maintenance continues to be challenging, but the difficulty decreases incrementally day by day, helped along by a decrease in the mother’s conviction that I am too stupid to keep a baby alive for more than 15 minutes. Things are going well. The breastfeeding picture keeps improving, I finally got Mom to let our son go for a stroller ride today, and I’m getting way better at making up plausible reasons why I can’t change the diapers.

I’m starting to experience moments during which I think about interests other than the care and welfare of the heir apparent. Today I thought about shooting.

I got myself a Tikka T1x bolt-action .22 with a too-expensive Athlon scope, and I love it. I decided I wanted to have, finally, a very nice semi-auto as well, and I thought I would be able to make one from my Savage A22. I learned some bad things about Savage, and I eventually ordered a Ruger 10/22. My first in rifle length.

The new 10/22 has a plastic stock, a short barrel, muzzle threading, and a built-in scope rail. It’s perfect for my plans to shoot squirrels with a silencer.

I shouldn’t say “plastic.” It’s like calling a G.I. Joe or Han Solo “action figure” a doll, which it is. Okay. Polymer. The 10/22 has a polymer stock. Hope everyone feels better.

What are polymers? Plastic. Moving on…

I bought a very fancy Kidd trigger assembly for the Ruger, so now all I need is a scope. The gun has no iron sights.

I went overboard on the Tikka, blowing over $400 on a first-focal-plane Athlon Helos 2-12 something or other with a mildot reticle and internal illumination. The scope is perfect for what I plan to do with it: short-range squirrel sniping, and targets up to 100 yards.

For the Ruger, I want a cheaper scope, which will have the virtue of being cheaper and also costing less, not to mention being more economical.

I don’t plan to shoot the Ruger at 100 yards, because I would expect that to be depressing due to the low quality of rimfire ammo and the high likelihood that the Ruger will never match the Tikka. I decided I needed 9x at the top end.

I already have a very nice scope that would work. A UTG Bug Buster that cost me something like $70. This scope is ordinarily associated with airguns, but it will work on a .22. It’s illuminated. The glass quality is fine for under 100 yards. It has parallax adjustment. It can focus on things as close as 10 feet away, hence the name “Bug Buster.”

So I bought one for the 10/22.

No, I didn’t. And I didn’t move the old one to the 10/22 from my Marlin Model 60, because then the Marlin would have no scope.

The Bug Buster now runs about $160, so it’s not the bargain it used to be. It’s right up there close to scopes made by real companies. I am no longer tempted to take a chance on it. When it was $70, I could say, “Well of course they cut corners. It was cheap.” Now if I find a problem, I’ll have to say, “This thing is nearly as expensive as a real scope, and look at it.”

I am thinking of an Athlon Talos 3-12x40mm. It’s made by a real company, but it’s only around 50% more expensive than the Bug Buster. It’s illuminated. It focuses down to 45 feet, which is good enough for squirrels. It has parallax adjustment.

What is parallax? It’s complicated to explain, but basically, if a scope’s parallax setting is off, and your pupil isn’t perfectly coaxial with the scope, your round will not hit the point of aim. The error may be small, but I am planning to shoot through squirrel brains, so small is way too big.

Parallax is distance-dependent. Many scopes have fixed parallax settings. That’s fine if you’re shooting a big honking deer Ray Charles couldn’t miss, but when you’re shooting at a tiny squirrel brain, it means you can only count on hitting it when the squirrel is at the distance for which the scope’s parallax is set.

No self-respecting squirrel would make it that easy.

I was studying up on scopes, and I kept wondering why so many had no parallax adjustments, and I realized it was because deer were so big.

It was surprisingly hard to find what I wanted. A lot of scopes had everything I wanted except parallax adjustment. A lot lacked illumination. The Athlon alone had it all.

I should probably get a second Bug Buster, but I can’t make myself believe a scope that sold for $70 during Trump’s first term can suddenly be worth $160 during his second term. Maybe it is, though. Maybe it was wildly underpriced back then.

I like mildot scopes, but Athlon only puts illumination in the MOA version of the Talos I want, so I guess that’s what I’ll get. It doesn’t really matter for squirrels. If I can’t guesstimate how big an inch or half an inch on a squirrel is without subtensions, I am not likely to hit him with the finest mildot scope on Earth. I should be able to say, “The dot is on his head, at this range the POI will be half an inch low, so I put the dot a Jujube’s width above his skull.”

Guessing at holdovers should be easy, but shooting with the wrong parallax setting would cause problems.

I think.

If I can get away from the house, Walmart, Target, and the pediatrician’s office long enough, I will try the Ruger with the spare Vortex Diamondback I put on it, and I will probably order the Talos. When it arrives, maybe I can start checking various brands of ammo in the Ruger and the Tikka. Then I can spray squirrel brains all over the farm, and I will be content at last.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just the simple things.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

3

I have been asking myself whether I should write about the recent addition to my family. I don’t want to give cowardly, underdeveloped Internet nuts power over my wife and son. On the other hand, we have strong prayer lives, I can easily (both physically and mentally) kill anyone who endangers us, I’m in a jurisdiction where the police will pat me on the back for it and possibly take me out for ribs, and I feel I owe something to people who have read this blog for years.

Some people have been reading since the beginning, two decades ago. I have gotten to know a few people, even if at a distance. I have prayed for them. I have met a handful. I don’t know if I can call people I’ve never met friends, but if not, some are pretty close to it.

I think this is the first photo I took after we brought him home. It was not staged. It’s amusing, and it should also serve to send a message.

I thought it was really funny. We were extremely sleep-deprived and barely knew what we were doing. We tossed him in the bassinet and started squaring the house away for bed, and a couple of minutes later, I saw I had left him near a carry piece.

Not a problem, since he was not able to rack the slide at that point.

Second photo, equally funny:

He was due to wake up at any minute, and I wanted to shoot some video. I rushed around looking for something to weigh the tripod down. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and then I saw some bags of .45 ACP handloads. Perfect.

He is healthy. He is happy and peaceful except when it’s time to be changed, and I wear ear protection for that. He really is as cute as the picture suggests. Not all babies have curb appeal early on, and we have learned that it’s a blessing. The staff at the hospital didn’t want to let him go home. I know they give good treatment to every baby, but it was pretty obvious that being really cute bought him some extra favor. They loaded us up with stuff we weren’t supposed to get.

I thought it was a little unusual for a baby to be this cute, so I asked people if it was just my perception as a parent, and apparently he is objectively cute.

The delivery process was a horror. They told us to go in at 4:45 a.m. on a certain day. Then after we had gotten up in the middle of the night, they told us to wait another day. Then they called us in at about 6:30 the next morning. Then they ran the air conditioner all night, and it was 53 degrees outside.

It was so cold, we put 6 blankets on my wife, and her hands still shook. I got the staff to yell at whoever ran the air conditioning, and we got them to provide two electric heaters. I slept in a winter coat with insulated gloves and two pairs of socks. The room warmed up the next morning at about the time labor got into gear. Then it got too hot.

The labor itself was terrible, which means it was normal. For medical reasons, we had to finish without an epidural.

It seemed much worse than it was, because we were both exhausted from lack of sleep and lying in a freezing room. The whole experience should have been much better.

We both had the feeling that the labor process was a crushing ordeal, but later we agreed that the main problem was that we had been deprived of sleep and subjected extreme cold. If she had gone into labor rested and warm, it would have been painful but quick and bearable, and it wouldn’t have taken us several days to get over the stress.

We are getting an acceptable amount of sleep now, although sometimes I start to doze off in a chair, and I make mistakes I wouldn’t make if I were rested.

The baby was 80th-percentile big, but he was not fat. He is heavy. He is now wearing stuff for 3-month-olds. He seems very strong. I thought newborns were like rag dolls, but he wrestles with us pretty forcefully. Yesterday he insisted on rolling onto his side. When I corrected him and put him on his back, he rolled back onto his side instantly, in spite of being swaddled. He lifts himself off his mother’s chest with his arms.

His eyes were very dark when he was born, but today, suddenly, they’re blue. I don’t know what to expect later.

He was hairy from the get-go, and the hair on his head is nearly black and pretty straight.

He feeds like a horse, so no problems there yet. He was supposed to lose weight, but I think he’s going the other way.

He seems to smile and light up when I bother him, which is a father’s duty. Web sources suggest the smile may be from gas, however. He has that to spare. He seems to like us. He appears to have fun sometimes.

For a long time, I prayed for God to give me a house of love, and now I have it, so don’t give up on your important prayers. I don’t think my son will ever have to know what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional home.

That’s about it. Don’t expect a lot of updates. We give our thanks to everyone who prayed for us.

What are They Putting in Brawndo These Days?

What planet did I wake up on today?

News outlets are disseminating video of the DNC’s suspension-of-disbelief-defying chair election. I don’t know what to say about it. I would say it’s like an SNL sketch, only not funny, but that also describes SNL.

You can see some of the antics in the video below. Particularly odd: Dr. Quintessa Hathaway making her campaign speech through song.

Yes, “Quintessa.” Like “Vanessa,” only 4 times better.

Out on a limb here, but I’m betting her doctorate isn’t in medicine, math, or science. Could it be that we have another Ed.D. to go with Bill Cosby and Dr. Jill?

BANG! Am I really this good? Nailed it. Her campaign website confirms it.

Sorry. Impressed myself there.

It could happen.

“You fight on”? What? What does that even mean? Fight what? “Your government”? The Democrats ARE the government. Okay, they lost control of all three branches temporarily, but overall, the government is a liberal institution, and while we may be getting some short-lived relief, government employees outside of the military are overwhelmingly in favor of leftist insanity.

Nothing makes less sense than a leftist who thinks he’s fighting the system.

Except maybe a person who claims retaliation for genocide is genocide. Or, you know…queers for Palestine.

You probably won’t watch the video, but if you do, check out the list of racist, sexist, realityphobic rules for committee member eligibility. Even the people reciting them don’t understand them. If I chose to side with these people, I would literally be unable to do it, because even with a law degree, I would not be able to make sense of the rules.

David Hogg ran for vice chair and apparently won. In his horrendous, self-unaware speech, he expressed his intention to end school shootings through gun control. Oddly, however, this is the same guy who thinks the police should not exist. Evidently, the way to handle crime is to disarm ourselves, give the government the job of defending us, and then disarm the government.

Many of us like to say Idiocracy has come true, but that’s not correct. The characters in Idiocracy weren’t insane. They were just stupid. The DNC is run by bona fide mental cases.

How much worse can things get before Yeshua deports us to heaven? This is becoming too weird to tolerate.

Not-so-Noble Savage

Looks like I will be receiving another .22 rifle, so I’m up to three 2025 guns, and it’s only January.

Go, me. I’m buying guns like Trump is signing executive orders.

Did he really change the name of the Gulf of Mexico? Can he actually do that? Can he change the name of Canada to North Detroit?

He wants to annex Canada. Fine, if we don’t let them vote. Otherwise, AOC or Bernie Sanders will be president for life, and criticizing the taste of hummus will be a felony.

Forget annexing Canada. Let’s force Canada to annex Detroit.

Canada is just a suburb of Detroit anyway.

And Minneapolis. Minnesotans are a Canadian subspecies.

I had a Savage A22. It was not threaded for a silencer. The barrel was too long. I found it difficult to find anyone near me who could alter the barrel, and I was hesitant to try doing it myself. I found out it was impossible to get Savage to provide a shorter barrel, although they make them.

I decided to get a long dial test indicator so I could try fixing the A22, and I also ordered a new Savage with a shorter threaded barrel. I figured threading the barrel would be a fun project and a way to get into barrel threading without destroying anything valuable, but I wanted a new gun anyway. I would make it my primary A22 while I fiddled with the other one.

The new Savage arrived.

It had grit in the threads that connected it to the stock, which was not situated symmetrically around the barrel. I had to use brake cleaner to clean one of the screws, and I still have to clean the other one. I don’t know what the grit consists of. It does not appear to be steel from machining. Could be buffing or grinding grit.

The trigger tested at 5-7 pounds. That’s the adjustment range. Insanely high. I may not be able to find a good solution without buying a $280 aftermarket trigger, which I am reluctant to do, given the gun’s other issues, the lack of other aftermarket parts (and OEM parts), and the availability of better guns.

The gun’s plastic dust cover was broken at the factory.

I have decided to get rid of the gun without even firing it. I plan to sell it and eat the loss. I could possibly change my mind, but this is how I feel now. I have already ordered a new Ruger 10/22 carbine to replace it.

A 10/22 is not a top-quality gun when it leaves the factory, but it is made by a manufacturer that seems to be on top of things, generally. The world loves the 10/22, so there is no end to what you can do to customize one. You can replace the barrel in 10 minutes. You can buy a drop-in trigger that far outclasses the gun and ammunition. There are all kinds of aftermarket doodads.

If you fiddle with a 10/22 long enough, you can make yourself a surprisingly good weapon. This is now my plan.

I’ve already customized a 10/22 Charger, so I know a little bit about the subject. But a Charger isn’t a rifle. Not until Trump kills the pistol brace ban and I can put a brace on mine. Then, yes, it’s a rifle.

I have a trigger on the way. I’ll receive it before the gun. When the gun arrives, I’ll test ammo and adjust the trigger. If the gun is worthy, I may get a good scope instead of settling for the old Vortex deer scope I have lying around.

I’ll get this thing to shoot 1 MOA or close to it at 50 yards, and then I’ll probably be able to resist buying another .22 until my son is old enough to shoot. I hope.

The .22 ammo testing continues. Guess I’ll post target photos along the way.

If I Liked Being Treated Like a Child, I Wouldn’t Have Guns in the First Place

More than once, I have written positive things about Savage firearms on this blog. I have a couple of Savage rifles, and a third one is coming. I have an A22, which is a semi-auto .22 rifle. I like it for a number of reasons, but it fails miserably in one regard: customer support.

I got myself a silencer, so I need a threaded muzzle for the A22. If I want to buy, say, a Smith & Wesson barrel, I can go to a website, place an order, explain nothing to anyone, and have the product sent to my house. I can also buy a barrel nut and a whole bunch of other things. If I want to buy a Savage barrel, well, I can’t. They will not sell me one. They won’t sell me the nut, either.

They won’t sell it to me. They won’t sell it to a gunsmith. They won’t sell it to God himself.

If you want to put a new barrel on a Savage A22, you have to ship your gun to Savage and pay them to do it. Okay, so it costs a little more. No big deal, right? Wrong. They will only give you the same kind of barrel the gun came with. Because…because of stupid, I guess.

The A22 comes from the factory with a variety of barrels. There is nothing dangerous about putting a different barrel on the gun. There is no good reason not to send people the barrels they like.

If Savage were willing to send parts out, people would buy more of their guns. Obviously. When people find out a manufacturer is anti-right-to-repair, they start buying from other manufacturers.

Good luck finding an aftermarket A22 barrel. The A22 is pretty far down on the popularity list, so it’s not like Shilen and Bartlein are scrambling to make barrels for it. There are lots of precision 10/22 barrels, though.

I plan to try altering the existing barrel myself, and if I somehow manage to fail, I’ll put the barrel in a dumpster and keep the rest of the gun for parts. I’m not poor. I can afford to destroy a cheap gun, especially one that is likely to cause me heartburn in the future due to poor treatment from the manufacturer.

Savage won’t send me a target trigger spring, either. And no one else makes them.

A company named Jard makes a high-end trigger for the A22. You can probably find one for about $270 if you look. About the cost of an A22. This is all that appetizing to most .22 shooters. The gun is 3 MOA at best, with a trigger made by the angels in heaven, so doubling the price of the gun to improve the trigger only makes sense for real enthusiasts who have a lot of money to spend.

The A22 has an Accu-trigger, which is a proprietary Savage thing intended to provide an easy, smooth trigger pull. Unfortunately, a lot of these guns have heavy pulls even after the triggers are adjusted to the minimum.

You can put a Savage target trigger in your A22, and it will lighten the pull, but Savage will not sell you the spring because you can’t be trusted with a complicated object like that. To get one, you would have to read off a serial number proving you own a gun that came with a target spring. You can also go to Gun Shack and buy one online, when Gun Shack has them in stock, but that’s about it.

Without a good trigger, the A22 is just an average gun, like a Ruger 10/22, but unlike the 10/22, it doesn’t come with a world of aftermarket parts for customization. Might as well buy an A22 and start customizing. You can rebarrel it. You can buy a new trigger. The sky’s the limit.

Gun manufacturers, unfortunately, tend to end up in the hands of stupid people. Marlin, Remington, and Smith & Wesson collapsed when firearms sales were peaking due to the efforts of the world’s greatest gun salesman, Barack Obama. If you can lose money in a market like that, you should be working for an hourly wage for someone who can do what you can’t.

I guess someone must have sued Savage over a part installed by an end user. They must have a weak-kneed attorney who told them to choke off the supply along with their customer goodwill.

Whatever. I’m all done with Savage.

Whose Past is on my Wall?

Sometimes I really disappoint myself. It’s already January 13, and I have only bought two rifles this year.

Technically, I’ve only bought one. I ordered one in late December and picked it up this year.

I’m pretty sure I’ve bought fewer than 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

The first rifle is a bolt-action .22. The second is a semi-auto. “What possible reason could a person have to buy two .22 rifles in one month?”, asked no reader of this blog, ever.

Last year, I made a tentative decision to cut 5.5″ off the barrel of my Savage A22 and thread the end for a silencer. I had received a .22 silencer, and it would have been cumbersome to have it hanging off a 22″ barrel. I tried to find someone near me who would do the work, but even though this is a huge 2A area, there is nobody. I think people here generally buy off the rack, receive no training, do very little customization, and shoot low-grade ammo.

I did some research, and I think I now know how to modify the barrel myself. I bought a dial test indicator to help me do the work.

I could have bought a new gun and sold the old one, but selling a gun is like selling a child, without the relief over not having to pay for college. Also, I have done a little work on the gun, and I wasn’t eager to do it over on a new one.

I guess that sounds silly. Not wanting to do a little trigger work on a new gun, but being willing to machine an old one. I wanted to learn how to thread barrels, though, so I wasn’t all that bothered by the prospect.

Another thing: it’s pretty unusual for a gun to drop in value. They go up and up and up. It’s almost always better to have an old gun than the money you could get for it.

While I was thinking about all this, I found out that Savage now sells the same gun, with a cute camo stock, with exactly the options I want. It has the short barrel and the threading. And it’s pretty cheap. Surprisingly so. I ordered one.

I figure I’ll shoot the new one and hold the old one until my son is old enough to shoot it. So several months, at least.

I am inclined to try cutting up the barrel anyway. It would be a good experience. If I blow it, I can buy a new barrel.

I should think about my son’s inheritance when I buy guns. If the rapture doesn’t come before I die, and 2A hasn’t been undone, my son or sons will get all my firearms. I should make an effort to leave some nice stuff behind.

My grandfather had some nice guns, but while he was alive, he failed to say who got what, and when he died, I got nothing decent except for a shotgun which actually belonged to my dad. My grandmother gave it to him after my grandfather died. The stuff I inherited from my grandfather is junk.

The worst example? A counterfeit shotgun.

Possibly counterfeit.

At some point after the nice guns had mysteriously vanished, I was given a list of things I could still have, and it wasn’t pretty. One thing that surprised me: no one wanted my great-grandfather’s gun. It had been mounted over a fireplace in my grandparents’ house. The story was that my grandfather tracked down the guy who owned it and bought it from him.

I remembered it as a fairly nice gun with a figured-wood stock.

I asked for it, and I received a double-barreled flintlock shotgun that looked like someone had painted the stock with something slightly nicer than Rust-Oleum. I don’t recall the valuation that was placed on it, but I know it was between $100 and $200. Trash, but for sentimental value.

I didn’t think too much about it. I decided to stick it on my wall.

Eventually, I remembered something from my childhood. I remembered playing with the ramrod from the gun my grandfather owned. It was a rifle ramrod, small enough to fit in a .40-caliber barrel. It was raw wood.

The crummy gun I received has a big, fat varnished ramrod. A shotgun ramrod. You could never get it into a rifle.

I don’t think this gun belonged to my grandfather. It looks like my memories were right. So now I have an almost-worthless gun which apparently belonged to some stranger, and when I see it on my wall, what I think about most is not my grandfather, but the mystery of what happened to the real gun.

Assuming my memories are correct.

Did the gun seller who evaluated the estate’s guns steal it and substitute the shotgun? Did one of my cousins take it home and tell the dealer to claim the shotgun was the one from the estate? I’ll never know.

At least I know why no one wanted it.

Now what do I do? Do I leave it on my wall?

I am thinking I might buy a nice antique Kentucky rifle, prettier and more valuable than anything great-great-granddad had. I have a practice of buying nicer guns than the ones that vanished. On top of that, I have real shooting training, and I make my own ammunition and modify my guns. And I have some excellent glass. I don’t think my grandfather owned a scope.

For a few grand, I can get something really nice, and it will appreciate.

If I had some of received my grandfather’s guns, most of what I would have gotten would have been mediocre. An old Smith & Wesson .357, maybe, with a 3″ barrel. Too heavy to carry; too short for targets. A Marlin lever action in an inferior caliber. A creaky old 12 gauge that can’t measure up to today’s standards. A .32 revolver only a pimp would carry on his person. An Enforcer M1 pistol, which is another item a pimp would like. Flashy, with very poor quality. The American Draco, except a Draco is a good, reliable weapon.

On the other hand, I have some pretty good stuff. Some beautiful 1911’s. A very nice Browning Challenger. A nicer Colt Woodsman than the one my grandfather had. An RPR that shoots 0.5 MOA or better. Some extremely accurate hunting rifles. An AR-15 with a White Oak Armament varmint upper. The Tikka .22 I got recently is infinitely better than anything my grandfather had. I also have some excellent revolvers.

I have a great shooting mat. Rests. I built my own roofed long-range platform which will last forever, along with a heavy-duty bench made from thick-walled 2″ square steel tubing. I fabricated my own gong stands.

I’ll be able to pass on some neat guns and related tools, and I’ll be able to teach my son(s) how to develop loads, mount scopes the proper way, and shoot at 1,000 yards. I don’t think my offspring will be upset about not getting a rusty Remington 550-1 .22 or a lever-action Marlin that shoots 4 MOA and has poor ballistics.

I only got one knife my grandfather owned, and like the shotgun, it came through my dad. One day he told my grandmother he would like to have a knife my grandfather owned, so she gave him one.

It’s a German folder with no lock. It rusts. It was nasty and rusty when I got it, because my grandfather used to cut apples with his knifes. It was dull. I fixed it up, because I’m the only grandson who has the tools for it, but I wouldn’t carry it. He carried junk knives. Street value? Probably $10.

On my own, I got Benchmade. Cold Steel made from CTS-XHP. Lionsteel made from M390. I have a handmade Entrek. Some Spydercos. Gerber is my low-end choice for jobs that might mess knives up. And I have a fancy rig for putting better-than-factory edges on knives.

I bought my son, myself, and my wife engraved Swiss Army knives in Switzerland. Now I have to hide his and mine for 8 years.

I’m not sure what to do with the shotgun. What if it turns out Gramps owned it, and it was in a closet or something when I was a kid? I don’t see any way it could be the gun with the skinny ramrod and the figured wood that I remember. The gun that had a powder horn with it, which vanished with the Marlin, the Remington, the Colt, and the revolvers. And my closeness with my relatives.

My relatives would lie if they were guilty, and they would say the same things if they were innocent. I already know what they would say if I asked about the guns and powder horn, so there is no point in bothering with them. One of the bad things about lying habitually is that it eventually teaches people that speaking to you makes things worse and is not worth the effort.

It would be great to have some heirlooms, but you can also make heirlooms. My grandfather’s dynasty fell apart, but mine can hold up, if we stick with God.

The new Savage should be here in a couple of days. The old one will be good for my son. Although a CZ 457 Scout with a 12″ length of pull would actually be better…

I’m going to stop now.

Cheap Ammo Surprise

Today I tested three types of ammunition in the Tikka T1x, using the Athlon Helos scope I mounted the other day. It is generally believed that one key to making a .22 accurate is to find ammunition it likes, so that’s what I’m doing.

Things were not totally optimal. I need to move the scope back one or two notches. The eye relief was not right, and it was hard to check the parallax. Nonetheless, things went pretty well. My dream is to shoot into half an inch at 50 yards with a .22, and I am getting closer.

I bought Eley Benchrest Outlaw ammo. Eley is one of the brands .22 competitors love. They also make something called Benchrest Precision, but it’s a lot more expensive.

I also bought CCI Sub-Sonic 40-grain lead round nose. Most people think subsonic .22 rounds are more accurate, and they definitely shoot much quieter from a suppressor.

My third choice was recommended by a guy on a forum. He said he had turned a couple of ladies loose with a .22 and some CCI Blazers, and they had shot really well. I ordered some 40-grain rounds.

Blazer is CCI’s cheap line, so you would expect it to be inaccurate. I paid 6.4 cents per round before tax, and that’s pretty low.

Sadly, it turns out you get what you pay for. On the high end, I mean. The Eleys gave me an average of 0.468″, or 1.28 MOA, at 35 yards. This included a flyer, but the flyer was not bad. I shot 4 10-round groups, and two were under 0.4″ Without the flyer, I was at 0.382″, or 1.04 MOA. I didn’t feel like I caused the flyer, but maybe I did. If so, Eley Benchrest Outlaw is very impressive.

The groups looked stringy, which made me unhappy and gave me the impression the Eleys were shooting worse than they were.

The Sub-sonics did not make me happy. I got a serious flyer which opened a group up to 0.840″. Without the flyer, I would have been at 0.515″ for an average, or 1.41 MOA. I don’t know if this stuff is prone to flyers or not. I am inclined not to trust it.

I forgot to shoot the last group. I wonder how it would have changed things.

The Blazers were great. They shot very pretty groups. Prettier than the other brands. I felt as though I were shooting better with Blazers, although the dial caliper told a different story. I averaged 0.555″, or 1.51 MOA. I may have had a flyer I caused, but it’s hard to tell, because the groups were still small. If you take out the worst group, I would be at 0.517″ or 1.41 MOA.

It looks like Blazers would be excellent for squirrels. They will hit harder than subsonics. The question is whether I can conclude anything about their reliability from 40 shots.

No .22 ammunition is truly reliable, as far as I know, but some are better than others.

I need to keep practicing. I laid off for a long time, so I need to get consistent, not just to shoot squirrels, but to test ammunition. I shot the Eley first today, and I was learning things the whole time. Maybe it would have shot even better had I shot it last.

People say CCI’s 38-grain Blazers are terrible, so I’m not going to bother with those.

I’m going to move the scope back and do some more shooting. Things are already looking really bad for the rodents.