Do I Smell Squirrel Gravy?

My EGW scope base arrived today, so I mounted my Athlon Ares 6-24×50 on my Savage 93R in .17 HMR. Behold.

I am extremely pleased. It fits nicely.

I didn’t intend to shoot today. It was supposed to rain like crazy in the afternoon. That didn’t happen, and at about 6:40 p.m., I found myself with a shiny new scope and good weather. I did the obvious thing. I did some zeroing.

I learned that buying a 20-MOA scope for a .17 HMR rifle makes zeroing an interesting experience. I had to go through quite a number of shots and turret clicks to get close to where I wanted to be. A 20-MOA base starts you out 20 MOA below where you would be with a flat base. That’s what? Around 6 mils? My scope didn’t come with a whole lot of mils in the tank, so I was concerned that I might not be able to get a zero at 100 yards.

As it turned out, I could zero at 50 yards, so everything is fine. The sloped base didn’t hurt me up close, and it certainly can’t hurt me when I move back to the rifle’s limit.

I’ll post a target photo. The cows are probably chewing on the target right now. It’s a mess. Up toward the right, you can see me walking the bullets in with the turrets.

There are a bunch of rounds in the center of the bullseye. I would love to say those were my last few shots, after I got things dialed in. They are not. My last shots are off to the left. They cover a little more than 1 MOA.

Now that I think of it, I’m not really sure where those shots in the center came from. I was concentrating on a lot of things, so I didn’t do a great job keeping track of shots.

I don’t know how well I can do with this gun, scope, and ammo. I have not shot it in optimal conditions. I didn’t have my parallax fixed, the scope was too far back on the base, I forgot the reticle battery, and I didn’t finish adjusting the comb. I know it will zero at 100 yards, though, and that’s all I wanted. It’s more than I expected to get done today.

Now I need to run out, fire a few rounds to get everything together, and then shoot two different targets with 17-grain and 20-grain ammo. That should tell me whether I should buy the heavy rounds or the light ones. Then I can try to load up online.

With a reasonable effort and no disasters, I should be able to make my mind up by lunchtime tomorrow.

I like the scope a great deal. It replaces a Burris Fullfield II. Unlike the Athlon, the Burris was made by a real American company with a long history. The Athlon is made in China for a relatively new American company, and it’s a steal at $380. As far as I can tell, the glass on the Athlon is just as clear at 24x as the Burris’s glass is at its maximum magnification of 14. People say Athlons track well, too. We will see.

I have a dedicated bipod on the way. I hate switching bipods. The one in the picture has a bizarre mounting system, and I don’t like fiddling with it. Pretty soon, it won’t be an issue.

This is a super-comfortable rifle to shoot. The nicest thing I can say about the trigger is that I never think about it. That’s as big a compliment as there is, when you’re a trigger. The comb I attached to the plastic…I mean “polymer”…stock works perfectly. A vertical grip would be nice, but I don’t need it. I don’t have to fight to get behind this gun to shoot. It lets me have its way with it.

“Polymer” is like “action figure.” You can’t call a boy’s Star Wars dolls “dolls,” and you can’t call a man’s plastic gun “plastic.” It’s POLYMER. End of discussion.

My hope is that I’ll shoot one unimpressive target tomorrow, as a final shakedown cruise, and then I’ll do some 1-MOA shooting. That would be nice.

Savage now makes a .17 HMR bolt gun which is supposedly better than this one. The magazine is a selling point. My magazine has to be installed pretty carefully, or it falls out and vanishes. It’s not a big deal if you make sure you pound it into the rifle. Also, I have two spares. The stock on the new model is supposed to be better, but I have this one fixed so it suits me perfectly. I don’t know how a new one could be an improvement, and if it were not, I would be looking at a considerable amount of aggravation, fixing the new gun so it worked as well as the old one.

Time for a cold beverage. The 93R is operational.

Angry Armed Civilians will Make Cops Look Like Wet Nurses

What’s going on here at the compound today? I know people want the inside dope.

I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my EGW 20-MOA scope base. It would be neat if I could plop it, and my new scope, on the Savage 93R and start shooting beautiful little .17 HMR rounds today. I don’t think that will happen. The mail arrives late in the afternoon, and there is apparently a new county ordinance that says it must rain torrentially at 4 p.m every day. It will take me an hour just to get the rifle set up. Looks like tomorrow will be the day.

I feel like I should order even more ammunition. I saw some guy on a forum apologizing for only having 20,000 rounds of .22 LR, and I felt inferior. I have a lot of .17 HMR, but Joe Biden just picked Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ real candidate for the presidency, and supplies may get even tighter than they are now. I enjoy shooting a great deal, and I don’t want to have to quit.

I want to find out whether 17-grain or 20-grain bullets shoot better before I commit. Should I wait for the scope to arrive, or should I use my old one to get it over with? Is it safe to wait a couple of days? Maybe not.

Biden, who is getting an MSM/MeToo pass on exposing himself to female Secret Service agents, will be dead by the 2024 election, and he will probably have his public appearances limited during 2021. Not that anyone will want to see him after he is forced from office. The left will want to move on ASAP so they don’t have to talk about lying about Biden’s illness. They’ll want to pretend they were all about electing a semi-black woman all along.

If Biden wins, we will soon be able to say we’ve had a black president. Obama was half black, and Harris is half black, so together, they make one president. As it stands now, we’ve only had half of one, and his black half wasn’t really black. It was African. His ancestors never worked in the Americas as slaves. They had no idea what cornbread or biscuits were. They made no contributions to the blues, ragtime, or jazz. They never participated in civil rights marches. Obama has no idea what it’s like to part of American black culture, but he could tell you about the comfortable suburban culture of the white grandparents who raised him when his parents ran off.

People are claiming Biden’s selection is groundbreaking. Everyone forgets Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They forget Herman Cain’s flirtation with the presidency, which was embraced by conservatives. They forget the fact that Democrat cabinets tend to look like Romney family reunions.

Well…I shouldn’t say that. There is at least one non-white Romney.

I keep asking God whether I should spend money on guns and ammunition. I feel he wants me to do it. I have asked him why. I now think the answer is that it’s for the people who don’t make it in the rapture. Lots of Christians, and nearly all Jews, will still be here, surrounded by violent, infantile people who are no longer restrained by the prayers of the people God removed. They will need guns and ammo to stay alive until they can get right with God. Or maybe God will give them a choice between using the weapons and accepting martyrdom in order to be saved.

I still feel like December will be the month, and somehow, the 11th seems like the day. Not pretending I’m certain, though. I haven’t seen a scroll appear with the date written on it in flames.

Imagine the simian behavior we will see from the left after the election, regardless of who wins. If they win, they’ll gloat and march and riot. It will be remarkable if leftist pogroms don’t begin in November. In January, the DOJ will give them license to riot all they want. If they lose, they’ll riot for months as their way of throwing a tantrum. Ruling by tantrum is their goal already.

I’ve been thinking about what they’re up against. They will need serious supernatural help from Satan. Leftist men tend to be feminine and soft. They tend to be unacquainted with weapons and tactics. Leftist women are women, and women don’t fight very well. On the other side, there are countless conservatives who have been stocking up on equipment since Obama was elected. Some started earlier.

I have been wondering who buys things like plate carriers. A plate carrier is a garment that holds bullet-resistant armor. I’ve wondered who buys dozens of AR-15 and AK-47 magazines. I think I know the answer. People aren’t preparing to protect their houses. You will never need a dozen magazines to put down a deer or a burglar. They’re preparing for civil war, and they’re doing a fine job.

I used to think people would give up their guns, just like Australians and the British. Now I don’t think so. I think the left taught conservatives they didn’t have to obey the law as long as they had numbers. I think tens of millions of conservatives will tell the police to jam it when they ask for their weapons. If you can take over a city with rifles and not be arrested, you can keep your AR-15 collection and your bump stocks and binary triggers.

It looks like leftists will be taking pepper spray, bags of feces, and bottles of urine to gunfights. To harm conservatives in a post-election scenario, you will need to be able to strike from at least 600 yards away, because that’s how far a cheap AR-15 will shoot effectively. No one in history has ever been able to throw pee that far.

Leftists can’t magically become competent at warfare in a month or two, and conservatives have been getting ready since they were born. Rioters do well in cities, where people are disarmed and conditioned to wait for the police to protect them. The farther out looters and arsonists go, the worse things will get for them. We’ve already seen small towns run them off.

They should start wearing camo instead of black.

The antichrist’s troops may have a false sense of safety because they’ve prepared to engage the police in cities. The thing is, the police are pussycats. They have to obey orders. They have to wear cameras. They’re forced to use non-lethal weapons. Civilians aren’t like that. They have real guns and zero oversight.

Because suburban and rural homes and businesses are relatively hard targets compared to urban ones, one would expect the leftist carnage and cruelty to be focused in cities. Of course, that has historically been the case. Rioters and looters are like animals that defecate in their own nests. Cowards who run from the strong attack the weak, and people who are too sorry to work will often be too sorry to travel. Also, many urban guerrillas don’t own cars.

Many people on the left and right seem delighted by the prospect of civil war. I suppose this is how people who have never seen real war think. It may sound like fun while you’re sitting at home cleaning your guns or filling bottles with pee, but it’s not fun when bodies start dropping and survivors have to be fitted with artificial limbs and colostomy bags.

Anyway, if the rapture comes, maybe nominal Christians who live nearby will need to use what I leave behind, to buy themselves time. I hope I’m not here with them.

On a personal level, I keep trying to get God’s help cleaning up my inner filth. I’m much better than I was 10 years ago, but the standard is Jesus, not my old self. I still let God down substantially from time to time.

I had a wonderful revelation. I think all improvement comes through divine revelation and impartation.

I’ll explain the revelation. I thought about gifts I had received from people who loved me. For purposes of this blog entry, you can think about things your mother gave you. You know how that works. She gives you something that really doesn’t work out, but 20 years later, you can’t throw it out, because your mom gave it to you. She saw it on the shelf, and she thought about her baby. She thought about how much she missed you, and she thought about you opening your present and remembering how much she loved you.

Then it turned out you didn’t have all that much use for a bread machine, so you put it in the garage and told yourself you would give it away. But you didn’t.

Every good thing we have is like that bread machine, except that the good things God gives us work.

It’s easy to get used to thinking of God as an enraged father who is fed up with your shenanigans. Things look different when you remember he’s a warm-hearted, generous father who delights in choosing things for you. It makes you feel bad about complaining and about not taking care of his gifts.

This is the person I let down when I sin. Maybe I have made him angry on occasion, but the Bible says I am like a son in whom he delights. My mother and father certainly had faults, but I know what it is to have two parents who delight in me. If I appreciate what they did for me, in their imperfection, how much more should I appreciate what God has done for me?

Thinking about this helps me with gratitude, humility, and obedience.

America is turning into a toilet because we have made ourselves fatherless. What do you see when you watch Antifa and BLM agitators hitting old people, breaking windows, stealing in mobs, and burning buildings? Punks. People who would never, ever do those things if their fathers were beside them. People who need guidance and discipline.

People are like dogs. When you walk a dog, it will see and smell interesting things, and it will try to run off to investigate. That’s when you yank the leash, tighten the choke collar, and make it clear that kind of behavior isn’t allowed to happen. People get stupid, disgraceful ideas. We pursue them. If we’re young and our parents are nearby, we get taken to the woodshed, and that helps prevent us from becoming useless punks. Fathers are generally the most effective dispensers of discipline.

Human fathers are extremely important, but they are just shadows of the father we really need. We cut off his influence when churches slandered the Holy Spirit and did away with the Holy Spirit baptism and prayer in tongues. We reduced God’s ability to correct us. This is why so many Americans think it’s okay to defecate on police cars and take over cities. It would be a great help if God sent out millions of angels who looked just like John Wayne, to shatter tailbones with steel-toed boots. It would save a lot of punks from destruction. Unfortunately, this is not the way God works. Bringing his order into the world has always been man’s job, not God’s.

I can think of a lot of occasions on which a devastating kick to the rear end would have changed the course of my life for the better.

My parents failed me. My dad was an atheist, and he was selfish and brutal. My mother was a nominal Christian. They didn’t put me in touch with God. They often spoiled me, because it was easy for them. Spoiling is a form of neglect.

Systematically, they failed to correct me. It’s a wonder I’m not worse than I am. Fortunately, God gave us this promise: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” That’s the only reason I am not headed for destruction.

My guess is that people see that verse and think it means God will protect them and give them things. I suppose that’s correct, but fathers and mothers are supposed to prune and shape us like trees. Apart from salvation, these are the best things God does for us. He takes us up and fixes the things our parents ruined.

For a long time, I’ve prayed for God to help me and the people on my prayer list not to be punks.

Churches don’t seem to talk about this. They let the punks teach them. Churches are full of awful ghetto music. Preachers and even their wives cover themselves with trashy tattoos. They try to turn Jesus into an MTV host. When the Holy Spirit is ignored, things like prophecy and healing stop, and church becomes painfully boring. Then preachers try to tart it up by adding worldly features. Meanwhile, the Bible reminds us to “remain unspotted from the world.”

The purpose of the crucifixion was to lift us, not to lower Jesus.

I can still see across the gun room, so maybe it’s time to buy more cartridges. Hope we meet in a better place while someone else is shooting up my ammo.

Money-Throwing Abates; Practice Begins

It’s a banner day. I shot a scoped rifle at something and actually hit it.

As noted in earlier posts, I put a new trigger spring and a Vortex Viper on my Ruger Venture in .204 Ruger. This was after some incredibly bad shooting with my AR-15. With the Ruger put together, I was ready for some redemption. Today I took it out to the pasture to zero it.

Apart from missing the paper entirely with several shots, due to a decision to turn a scope turret the wrong way, things went very well. Until the deluge started. I was only able to shoot one target before getting drenched. I’ll post a photo.

I know what you’re thinking. That looks pretty bad. Okay, yes, but it represents several groups.

I started way off to the right, turned the turret the wrong way and sent several shots past the target. Then I started bringing them in. I would love to say all the holes in the center are part of one group, but they aren’t. I startled myself by putting one there unexpectedly, and then I decided to improve the zero by giving the turret one more click.

After putting four holes in the center, I shot at a place to the left where two yellow lines crossed. I hit it square. By the time the 6th shot was off, the rain was getting out of control, so I quit. I didn’t measure, and the cattle will probably eat the target before I can put calipers on it, but I’m pretty sure that whole group is under 1 MOA. If not, it’s close enough for government work.

I can’t be positive, because the clouds will not let me shoot long enough to find out, but it sure looks like this gun and ammo will do sub-MOA pretty consistently at 100 yards, if I practice a little more. If not, well, 1 MOA is clearly doable, and that’s excellent.

It’s a major relief to confirm that I can shoot. It looks like I still have horizontal stringing, but there has to be a way to fix that.

The trigger is as good as it can be, within my ability to judge triggers. The scope is very nice. I need some way to tighten the bipod up a little; they sell aftermarket levers. Anyway, I can finally say I have a gun that will shoot well enough to let me focus on technique instead of equipment. For all I know, it would shoot even better with handloads.

This is a bad, bad day for coyotes and coons.

The End of Days Is no Excuse for Bad Cooking or Poor Shooting

I dare anyone to say I don’t make great use of my time.

Today two wonderful things happened. I got over the local-pizza-ingredient hump, and I put a new scope on my Thompson Center Venture rifle.

I probably should not be thinking about pizza, but the pandemic and the mythical food shortages associated with it shift one’s thoughts in the direction of shopping and cooking, and I am a casualty. Early in the crisis, flour disappeared from shelves, and when it reappeared, bread flour lagged by at least two months. I bought some wheat gluten before everyone else thought of it, and I started fooling around with it. I tried to make baguettes, for example.

Pizza is a mysterious food. It only has three major ingredients, and preparation is extremely simple, but it’s one of the hardest things to figure out how to make. I figured it out when I lived in Miami. It turned out ingredients were extremely critical. I had to use certain things, or it didn’t work. Then I moved north, and I was no longer able to get those things.

You can use just about any flour to make a great Sicilian pizza, but for some reason, thin pizza doesn’t work that way. Most of the flour at your local grocery just won’t cut it. The texture or the flavor or both will be off. Bread flour works well, and some bread flours are better than others. Some people insist on Caputo 00 flour from Italy. It’s a low-ash flour without much gluten. I tried it, and I didn’t think much of it.

A local store started stocking King Arthur bread flour a couple of weeks back, so naturally, I have been making pizza. The flour gave me good results, but I was not completely happy.

I researched, and I decided I should try diastatic malt powder. This is a dough conditioner. You add a small amount to your flour, and it makes the product blow up better and brown better in the oven. I couldn’t find it around here, but Amazon sells it. Today I put a little bit in my flour, and the result was very good. The dough browned earlier, it blew up better, and it wasn’t as chewy as it had been in previous efforts. It rose fast, and the flavor was good.

I knew something good was happening when I rolled the proofed dough out and started tossing it. It had a silky feel to it, and it opened up beautifully. It didn’t even try to tear. Tossing a 10″ pie took less than a minute. It was a snap. I don’t know how malt works, but it worked great today, and I plan to keep using it.

I also tried a new tomato product. Nearly all of the tomato products stores sell are useless for pizza. The manufacturers use unripe tomatoes or the wrong varieties. It’s easy to get or make a sauce that looks red and tasty, but when you take a bite of a slice, you will know you’ve been had.

My go-to sauce is Saporito, from the Stanislaus company. It’s tomato paste, basil, and citric acid. It’s very sweet and fruity. I doctor it up with a few things, and it’s excellent. But I can’t get it around here.

I’ve been trying various items from local stores. Today I decided to try Muir Glen “organic” paste. I put “organic” in quotation marks because “organic” is an empty Pavlovian stimulus which motivates people to spend three times as much for food that isn’t any better. There are no real standards for organic food production, except that you have to put “organic” on the label.

The can says Muir Glen is made in Central California, and the Muir Glen website shows big Roma tomatoes, just like the ones Stanislaus uses. Stanislaus is a California company.

I combined some paste with garlic powder, oil, salt, oregano, and a couple of other things, and I put it on a crust made with diastatic malt. I used sliced Sargento mozzarella and sliced Boar’s Head fontina. I sprinkled oregano and salt on top of the cheese, and I baked at 500° on a preheated stone. I can’t do better than 500° with my oven.

The pizza was very nice. I used too much cheese and not enough sauce, but it was a lot better than pies I had made earlier in the week. I feel like my suffering is over. Not that I plan to make a lot of pizza. I was just frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to do it with things I could buy here.

I really want to make garlic rolls with malt, but I have to maintain some self-control.

I can supply the ingredient list, if you want to try it.

INGREDIENTS

125 grams King Arthur bread flour
80 grams warm water
2 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. diastatic malt

You can add oil to make it softer. My understanding is that you should knead, add oil, and knead again. Some food reason I no longer recall.

I gave it a pretty decent “kneading” in the food processor, going for at least 30 seconds after it formed a ball. I prepared the pizza on a square of non-stick foil, which I removed from the stone after two minutes. You just pull it out from under the pizza. If you use this method, you won’t have to try to shove a sticky raw pizza off a peel. You put it on the foil, and the foil slides off, taking the pizza with it. After two minutes of cooking on the foil, the crust is strong enough to tolerate having the foil yanked out.

As for the rifle, some Seekins scope rings arrived today, and I was able to mount a Vortex Viper PST 6-24×50 on it. This is a discontinued scope I bought accidentally. I was going to return it, but I decided it would be more than adequate for .204 Ruger, which is only useful at or below 400 yards. I think I did a good job of mounting it. I used a torque wrench and all that. I changed the trigger spring two days ago, so now I have a killer varmint rig with a very light touch. I still have my ATN night scope, so I have the Vortex for daytime, and if I ever decided to try shooting coons at night, I’ll have the ATN ready to go.

Very nice. It’s wonderful when you get a firearm working correctly. I can’t wait to zero the scope and see what the gun can do. Based on earlier results with a scope which is hard to use, I have high hopes of being able to put 10 rounds in a 1″ circle at 100 yards.

People call the Venture a cheap gun. Maybe so. I have never shot an expensive bolt rifle, so I don’t know what I’m missing. I think the most expensive bolt guns I’ve shot were a 6mm and a 30.06, probably Remington, when I was a kid. With the Venture, I have what appears to be a phenomenal trigger and a highly accurate gun, so what’s not to love? The bolt has been very sticky, and that led me to blow a hole in the pasture while trying to close it, but I have been running it back and forth in order to loosen it up, and it seems to be working. I should be able to make it nice and slick with some effort. After that, it will be really hard to see what an additional thousand dollars would have bought me.

On Wednesday, the scope base for my .17 HMR should arrive, unless it’s in the mailbox already. Then I can put an Athlon scope on my Savage 93R, and I’ll be all set for inexpensive, nearly recoil-free 100-yard practice.

Scoped rifles have been a source of frustration for me, and a lot of it has been equipment-related. By the end of the week, I should have 3 rifles set up well with MRAD scopes, and I may even have my AR-15 set up correctly. After that, I should be able to focus on learning to shoot instead of subduing uncooperative weapons.

I’m not shooting today because I don’t want to make my neighbors miserable. Any sane person should be satisfied with three sessions a week.

That’s what I’m telling myself at the moment.

I’m blessed to have a few readers who give me good advice and save me from myself. Jim from the now-defunct Smoke on the Water pops in from time to time to cut through the BS I’ve read and heard. Recently, he provided some tips on leveling scopes, which is a BS-intensive topic from one end to the other. I believe I will only need such information for my Ruger Precision Rifle and LR-308, because nothing else I have will shoot far enough to make leveling matter. Anyway, his comment will be there when I need it.

I still want to get a Tikka T3x in 6.5 Creedmoor. I do not hunt at all, apart from small annoying creatures of the sort taxidermists hide in their back rooms, but I have dreams of getting out there and trying, and I need at least one rifle for large game. The hunting picture is not rosy for me. There is nothing worth shooting (legally) on this property, and I feel funny about wandering around on public land wearing day-glo overalls, surrounded by beer-drunk weekend warriers with itchy trigger fingers and cataracts. Even if I did get out there and try, I don’t know what to do with a whole deer, and I can’t make myself shoot a bird smaller than a turkey. That’s what owning parrots will do to you. It’s really too bad pigs don’t come to visit.

I could pay for a guide and shoot some pigs on a hunting property, but that’s a little bit like going outside and shooting one of the cattle. I hope they would at least let me get out of the truck.

I shouldn’t joke. I remember shooting a rabbit from my grandfather’s Buick Riviera. He was a great grandfather.

My 6.5 Creedmoor dies arrived. I’m waiting for a case trimmer. I think I ordered bullets and powder. Yes, I remember it now. Primers are on their way to the nearest Bass Pro. Once my rifles are functioning, I’ll be able to think about making my first rifle rounds.

That’s all that’s happening here, apart from the apocalypse. Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

5 MOA!

I shot my AR-15 again today. Yesterday I got keyholing and weird performance at 100 yards with 40-grain bullets, so today I shot 50-grain Fiocchi Extrema rounds with V-Max bullets.

Yesterday, along with the keyholing, I got inconsistent accuracy, and because I managed to put nearly all of 9 rounds in one big hole, I don’t think I’m the problem, nor do I think the gun is incapable of shooting well.

Today, things did not go well at all. I didn’t get keyholing as far as I can tell, but grouping was so bad, I quit and took the gun indoors to see if I could find any loose screws on it.

Here is the first target. I always start on the bottom-left bullseye and go clockwise. I shot at each bullseye 5 times.

The first group looks like a 1.5-MOA group plus a flyer. Could be worse, as the second group, at top left, shows. The next group, at top right, looks like it’s centered around a different point of impact. The last group looks about like the first one, except that it’s centered below the center of the bullseye.

Here is the second target. Before I shot it, I fiddled with the scope’s parallax knob. I thought it could be the problem. I find it hard to adjust parallax out from a prone position.

The first group is wonderful. I thought my problems were solved. Then I tried to hit the upper-left bullseye, and it was like one of the scope’s rings had broken in half. I would call it 4 MOA, but that makes it sound better than it is, because one round hit the top-right bullseye. The highest hole in the top left bullseye looks like it may be a keyhole.

I didn’t try to put a group in the top-right bullseye. I shot at the one on the lower right, and at first, I thought I had missed completely. I had to go look at it. I stopped shooting. I can’t shoot when I have no idea where the bullets are going. I know I’m not going to hit a cow or miss the berm, but spraying and praying is not good practice.

Seems to me that the 5-round, one-hole group proves the gun and I can shoot. You can put 3 rounds in one hole by accident, but it’s not nearly as likely with 5 shots, and the other day, I put most of 9 shots in one big hole. So something is wrong.

Someone suggested the barrel nut might be loose. I took the handguard off the gun and looked at the nut, which turned out to be a special nut that works with a regular wrench (yay). The nut was very tight. I looked to see if the gas tube was hitting anything. I looked at everything I could think of.

Finally, I looked at one of my magazines. I saw an article about AR accuracy problems, and it mentioned magazines. The writer was talking about feeding issues, but it occurred to me that a bad magazine might damage bullets.

When I checked the magazine, I saw that it had sharp metal edges in front of the bullets, and the edges were shiny. It looked like they had brass or copper on them. I shoved a cartridge forward, and sure enough, the bullet hit the edge. I looked at a bullet, and I saw a couple of little marks on it. I don’t know if it was damaged badly enough to make it fall apart in flight, but I didn’t want to take chances. I cut recesses in both magazines so the bullets couldn’t touch them. I have some plastic magazines, and they were made with these recesses.

It amazes me that anyone would make a magazine that shaves metal off cartridges, but there you go.

I don’t know if this is what’s causing the accuracy problem, but it can’t be helping. I ordered a couple of short plastic magazines to replace the cheap metal jobs I modified.

After considering everything else, I have to think about the scope. It may be defective. Something inside it could be rattling around. I may put another scope on the gun and shoot it to see what happens.

This really looks like a 0.75-MOA gun, with the right ammo and good concentration. The gun and I can do 1 MOA if I can get the bugs ironed out. It’s very obvious that something other than user ineptitude or a fundamental gun problem is at work. No one goes from a 1″ group to completely missing the bullseye in one day without some kind of unusual mechanical problem.

The more I work with this gun, the more I realize the AR platform is a mess. It’s practically a religion. These guns have all sorts of problems unique to the genus, and you have to buy special tools to work on them. I can’t discount the fun, though. Buying an AR is like buying a puzzle. Making it function is part of the joy.

I may put a different scope on the gun tomorrow. If it shoots well, all this fuss about other sources of inaccuracy will prove to be a total waste of time.

Unfortunately, I Took Pictures of it First

I feel conflicted. On the one hand, today I got to shoot an AR-15 in my own yard, far from Miami. That’s excellent. On the other, I shot like a cop wearing tactical pants with 35 zippers.

I took the AR-15 out and shot Fiocchi Extrema ammunition from it. This ammunition has Hornady V-Max bullets. Based on my experience with Fiocchi ammo in my .204 Ruger, I have no doubt that Fiocchi makes good stuff. Still, this is what happened:

The first bullseye I shot is at the bottom left on the first target. I shot 9 rounds into it. The others got 5 rounds each. It’s pretty good, even though I forgot to extend my buttstock. I was hanging off the rear of the rifle for 9 rounds.

I always start at 7 o’clock and go clockwise. The second bullseye is not as good as the first, but it’s okay. Five rounds and 4 holes, not far apart.

The next bullseye, at top left, is not great. I got a fairly big semicircle of 4 shots, with a shifted area of impact. One shot was so bad, it’s outside the black. Three of the shots are elongated. No idea why. I don’t think bullets should tumble and keyhole at 100 yards.

The next bullseye, at 4 o’clock, is okay, but why are there only 4 holes? Sometimes I shoot two rounds through one hole out of pure luck. I certainly hope that happened here, because thinking of the alternative gives me stomach cramps.

Next, at 7 o’clock on the bottom-left bullseye on the second target, I did okay, with a flyer. After that, things went completely nuts. The bullets went in random directions, and I got elongated bullet holes. No idea what that’s all about. I’m hoping I can blame the bullets. If they’re tumbling at 100 yards, I want my money back.

I’m starting to think this may not be the most accurate gun on earth. I am not a great rifleman, but I’m better than this. If I were the problem, you would expect my shooting to improve during a session, but my last three bullseyes are scary.

It sort of looks like things went utterly sideways, with elongated bullet holes, and then things started to get normal again on the last bullseye. Is that even possible?

I’m using a LaRue trigger I installed. I liked it at first because it was a great improvement over my stock trigger. Now I like it less. It seems like a quality trigger, but the pull is just too heavy. It’s not made for precise shooting. At least I don’t think so. I think it’s aimed at people who put on plate carriers and walk around shooting at steel with their thumbs on top of their barrels. I could use something lighter.

I changed my rear bag. My first rear bag was a leather rabbit-ear bag. When I bought it, I assumed it was a useful item, because legitimate companies sold leather rabbit-ear bags. I didn’t think they would sell something no intelligent person would use. I eventually found out real shooters used soft rear bags. I bought an Armageddon Gear X-wing fabric bag, and it was not bad. It seemed too small, though. I found I was always working to lift the butt of the gun high enough. I got a larger one, and it’s much, much better. Not good enough to make me shoot well today, however.

Now I have a puzzle to solve. What’s causing the keyholing?

It may be that the gun just doesn’t like 40-grain ammo. I should shoot a little 55-grain before I give up on it. It has a 1:9 twist, and that is supposed to be a little fast for light rounds.

Actually, I read that barrel twist actually correlates with bullet length, not weight. Life is never simple.

If the twist rate is the problem, why is the keyholing intermittent? It seems to appear and then go away. Is something collecting in the barrel, causing keyholing, and then blowing out so the gun can shoot accurately again?

I feel like I should quit changing the gun until I get some more shooting time in with something that actually works. I can’t eliminate the human factor unless I’m sure I’m shooting well. Unfortunately, it will be at least Wednesday before I can shoot the .204 or the .17 HMR with new glass. I could always stick the ATN night scope back on the .204. The problem is that I’m reluctant to keep shooting with fuzzy imaging when I can wait a couple of days and use a Vortex.

I can shoot the Ruger Precision Rifle. I have a sanity-hearing-level stockpile of ammo.

I’m starting to wonder how good my Sellier & Bellot 6.5 Creedmoor ammo is. A Youtube guy appeared to shoot it into under 1 MOA with an RPR, but people have been known to lie, and ammunition doesn’t always perform the same way in different examples of the same gun.

The RPR has a new bolt shroud. I am eager to try it with live ammo. Maybe I should take it out to the pasture tomorrow.

I was not totally happy with the trigger in my Thompson Center Venture, which is my .204 Ruger gun. It seemed heavy for an adjustable trigger. I contacted Smith & Wesson (Thompson Center is a fiction) and asked about buying parts so I could upgrade to the Venture II’s trigger, which is better. No dice. They refuse to sell the parts. I guess I’m all done buying Thompson Center rifles.

I found an aftermarket spring. A company called Mcarbo sells it. Today I installed it. I was hoping for a pull weight of maybe 2.5 pounds. I don’t have a gauge, but when I was done, the trigger felt lighter than that. Mcarbo has an installation video, and their own guns came in under 2 pounds.

I like a light trigger, but I don’t want my rifle to go off every time the wind blows. If my scope rings ever arrive, I’ll take the gun out and see what it feels like in use. The impression I get is that instead of shooting this gun, I’ll be thinking the bullet into the target. I’ll think about pulling the trigger, and the bullet will take off. The pull may be lighter than desired, but the gun may turn out to be a dream to shoot.

I guess I should clean the AR’s barrel and try 40-grain and 55-grain ammo. If heavier ammo doesn’t keyhole, maybe it means the gun has a peculiar hatred for light bullets. If both weights keyhole, something abnormal must be happening.

Of course I want a new barrel. I always want new gun parts. But maybe a new barrel won’t help.

I should have known this was going to be a rough session. When I set up my first target and got settled in to shoot, a calf wandered over and started chewing on the tape holding it up. I used to think I was crazy for thinking they were eating my targets. Now I’ve seen it. I had to jump up and run him off before he ate everything.

Maybe I can get some Ruger redemption tomorrow. I can break out the Sellier & Bellot, and if I can’t make it work, I have two flavors of Hornady match ammo standing by.

Lee Dies Ruin my Day

I have an extremely important message for all users of the Internet.

Do not use Lee carbide 9mm dies on a Hornady Lock n Load AP progressive press.

A while back, I loaded up on 9mm semiwadcutter bullets. I wanted them for practice, and they’re also not bad for self-defense. Then I found out I didn’t actually have 9mm dies.

All the dies I had were made by Hornady, and I wondered if I was cheating myself by not trying companies like RCBS, Lyman, Lee, and Redding. I ordered a set of Lee carbide dies.

The carbide was what got me going. If you use carbide dies, you don’t have to use case lube, and presumably, carbide dies will last a long time.

I took these things out of the package a few days ago. The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t have Hornady-style locking rings. They had weird rings with slots cut into them for grip. It took me a minute to realize they were locking rings.

I stuck the dies on my press, and guess what. They didn’t fit. The threaded parts of the dies were maybe 3/8 of an inch too short. When I screwed them into the press deeply enough to make them work, the locking rings, which were on the upper side of the press (where they should be) were barely engaged. Only a thread or two held them on. At least one of the dies seemed to wobble when I pushed on it.

I Googled around and learned that this is a well-known design flaw. It’s amazing that Lee let it happen. There are probably less than 8 prominent companies that make reloading equipment, and they don’t make a huge number of products. Hornady’s press is very popular, Lee knows about it, and they made no effort to make their dies work with it.

I’ll tell you how you solve the problem. You buy new dies. That’s what I did. But you can also move the locking rings from the top of the press to the underside of the die platform. It allows you to screw the dies down where they need to be without sacrificing locking rings.

The problem with this crude solution is that you end up with dies that take a long time to swap. With Hornady dies, you just twist the die and the whole assembly pops out. The locking ring comes with it. With Lee dies, you have to remove the locking ring first, and Lee makes them tight and puts some kind of sticky goop on the threads to make the rings harder to turn. It’s probably great when you use a Lee press and you’re able to put the rings where they should be, but it’s a royal pain if you own the press I have.

I managed to crank out a few rounds, but I ordered Hornady dies anyway.

Figuring out which dies I wanted took hours. It’s not as simple as it sounds. When I bought dies years ago, they all came with roll crimpers. A roll crimp turns the mouth of the casing inward, and if your crimp is too heavy, it makes the metal bulge out slightly below the mouth. Then you get a round that won’t chamber. This is not a great design for most pistols I own.

There are a couple of other options. One, which I’ll get rid quickly by discussing it first, is the Lee Factory Crimp die. I’m not sure I understand this thing completely, but my understanding is that it pushes a sort of sleeve down over the casing and sizes it from the mouth down. This tightens the casing on the round and makes it less likely that the cartridge won’t chamber. It also makes it less likely that the bullet will be pushed deeper into the casing while its being handled and chambered and so on.

Problem: it’s a Lee product, and it has short threads. Forget that.

The other option is a taper crimp. This compresses the mouth of the casing without forming a rolled area or a bulge. I decided I wanted this.

Now I had to decide. Did I want a set with a separate crimping die, or did I want a set with a single die that crimps and also seats the bullet?

It turned out I had no choice. The Hornady set with the dual-function die cannot be had. The apocalypse has dried up the supply. But I learned that this was a good thing, because a separate crimping die produces better results, and it’s easier to adjust two dies than one dual die.

I found what may have been the last Hornady three-die set on earth, and I ordered it. Before you ask, I could not find other brands. That may not be entirely true. Redding may have a set that costs $200. I didn’t bother with products like that. I also ordered a Hornady taper crimp die.

The set comes with a dual-purpose die, but I can fix it so it seats bullets but does not crimp them. It will go size and decap, expand, fill, seat, crimp.

There will be no room for a Powder Cop, but I think they’re stupid for short casings anyway.

I the end, if I manage to sell the Lee dies, I figure I will come out $50 in the hole. That’s life.

I’ve only made 5 charged rounds, and something is going on with the press. When I pull the handle, the press moves until it gets to a certain point, and then it stops. Then if I push it harder, something gives way, and it finishes the cycle. That’s not good. I seem to produce good ammo, but I have to be very careful with every turn of the handle. I think I’ll end up producing a lot of rounds that have to go through twice. I’m going to leave it alone and start over with the new dies.

I’m using Missouri Bullet cast semiwadcutters. The Missouri Bullet company is not brave like other companies. They will not publish load data. This may be why other bullet makers are more successful. Oregon Trails, for example, wrote a whole handbook which you can download for nothing. Missouri Bullet is cowed by lawyers, so you have to find data for similar bullets and do your own work-ups.

I couldn’t find anything that was really good. I admit, I forgot to check the Lyman manual. Accurate publishes load data (brave) which you can download, and I found a recipe that looked okay. It was for an Oregon Trail bullet I had on hand. Problem: that bullet is shorter than the Missouri SWC. That means using the same overall length will push the bullet farther into the casing. This can increase the pressure and cause problems. How big would the problems be? How would I know?

I measured the bullets and found that the Missouri SWC was 0.06″ longer. I decided to increase the OAL by a fraction of that number, and I used a conservative charge. I ended up with bullets that did about 1080 fps, which is fine for 9mm. The casings looked good, so I don’t think I have pressure issues.

These bullets have lube grooves. Lube is wax. Lube grooves are deep, wide slots that go around the bases of bullets, and they are packed with wax. Because of my long AOL, my bullets each had one groove exposed.

I had to read about this. I found out it’s not a big problem. The cartridges will work. Wax can get on things, however, and I don’t like that. I’m thinking I’ll decrease the OAL and see what happens. I read the SAAMI specs, and I will be well within them. That doesn’t mean it will work, but it means I’m not off the reservation.

I would like to get up to maybe 1175 fps. That figure appears in published loads. It would be really nice to go that fast with 9mm.

You’ll never guess which powder I ended up using. Not unless you’re a stalker who actually reads everything I write and remembers it. I found that Accurate No.7 was a top choice. Is there anything that powder can’t do? If you have No.7 and Unique, you can load just about anything. No.7 is extremely versatile, and it’s also flash-suppressed.

So I used No.7. Not.

I have a bunch of BE-86, and I didn’t have a use for it. It’s also flash-suppressed, and it works for this bullet. It’s what I decided to use. I am very happy.

Now my press is set up for 9mm, but I can’t use it. I have to find another firearm job to do while I wait for new dies.

I’m thinking of buying Lehigh Defense bullets for self-defense. I keep reading about them. They look like Phillips screwdrivers, and they’re solid copper. They have provided very destructive results in testing. They also go through barriers like crazy. Ordinary hollow points have problems with things like windshields and drywall, and if they clog with fabric on the way into a perp, they don’t expand. A Lehigh Defense Xtreme Defender will go right through a windshield, even at an angle, and it doesn’t have to expand, so it doesn’t care about clothing. Bonus: they only weigh 65 grains, so the recoil is light, assisting with followup shots.

A guy on Youtube shot right through heavy bulletproof glass with Lehigh bullets.

A lot of people sneer at these bullets. Yeah. I remember sneering at Facebook. Look where it is now. I saw a Youtube expert say he wouldn’t trust them until they had been tested on live animals and so on. So I guess he only buys hollowpoints that were tested on live animals using the scientific method? What brand would that be?

One of the most lethal and experienced police gunfighters wrote about the real-life problems he had in shootouts. His name is Jim Cirillo. He made it clear that failure to penetrate was a huge problem. He shot a man in the skull with a .38, and the bullet slid around his head under the scalp and never entered the cranium. He and a partner shot a man in the face a number of times, and the same thing happened. The man got up and walked to the police car with them. If he had been up against unarmed women, he could still have raped and murdered them.

Cirillo thought developing bullets that actually get inside criminals was extremely important, and he dedicated years to trying to develop something that worked. He came up with something similar to the Xtreme Defender, but he never perfected it. He wanted something that penetrated auto glass and sheet metal. It looks like Lehigh and some other companies are following his lead.

Lehigh says its bullets are extremely destructive inside a body. This may or may not be true in practice. Maybe they’re no better than hollowpoints. But they have the advantage of piercing things like leather and heavy fabric much better, and right or wrong, testing suggests they will do more damage than hollowpoints. They may be a smart bet.

I’ve seen Paul Harrell, the Youtube guru, test these things. He shot what looked like a 2″ group at 10 yards. This is not great by his standards, and he said as much, but on the other hand, how much will 1″ groups help you when punks attack you in a parking lot? You, the punks, and the coroner will never see the difference between 1″ rounds and 2″ rounds.

Harrell uses a hilarious meat target to evaluate rounds. Xtreme Defenders tore it up like nothing else. He uses watermelons to simulate lungs, and the bullets destroyed them. The issue here is that watermelons aren’t stretchy. Does that mean Xtreme Defenders won’t do all that much damage to lungs, which can stretch and recover? Well, he had pork on both sides of the watermelon, and the pork was ripped up pretty badly. Pork is like human flesh. It suggests, but doesn’t prove, the bullets will work.

Job 1 is to be able to hit important body parts by shooting well. Job 2 is to get the bullets inside the criminal so they can do their work. Everything else takes a backseat.

I’m thinking it over.

As I’ve often said, I have zero interest in shooting anyone, and I have doubts about my willingness to send unsaved people to hell in order to survive on this miserable earth, but when you own equipment designed for a certain purpose, the natural thing is to try to make it work well.

I received a new bolt shroud for my Ruger Precision Rifle. This is a part that attaches to the bolt, obviously. The stock part lets the bolt rattle around a lot. This is annoying, because when you pull the bolt back and then try to move it forward to chamber a round, it may actually bind and get stuck. I don’t mean it gets stuck to where you need a hammer, but you may have to wobble the bolt and push a second time. It’s amazing that Ruger let this happen.

Should I care about a sticky bolt? Yes. I don’t like moving around between shots. You want things to be consistent. If you take your face off your buttstock (that sounds bad) between rounds, you upset everything. I want “BOOM-click-click-BOOM,” not “BOOM-click-rattle-rattle-curse-shove-BOOM.” I don’t actually curse, but the temptation is there.

Today I’ll install the bolt shroud. That should take almost two minutes.

I look forward to trying it. I also got a larger rear bag, and I’m hoping the improved bolt and less-fiddly bag will close up my groups.

I’m also going to see if I can set my Savage 93R in .17 HMR up with a new Athlon scope. I did all the math for the scope, base, and rings, but when I tried putting them together on my AR-15 for laughs, I found out there was an additional factor. Even if your rings and rifle work with your tube and bell, things can bump into the eyepiece, which has a larger diameter than the tube. I couldn’t check the scope on the Savage because I was waiting for a suitable base to attach.

I made an error when I ordered the base. Reflexively, I ordered a 20-MOA base. This is a base with a 20-MOA downward slope toward the front. When you shoot long distances, you may have to drop your barrel over 40 MOA, and you can run out of clicks. An angled base will help. Sadly, I forgot that no one shoots .17 HMR at really long distances. For prey, you can do 300 yards at best. You can shoot longer distances if you’re just happy to hit anything. So I have a 20-MOA base I don’t need. When I set up at 100 yards, I’ll be starting out 20 MOA in the hole.

I don’t know if it will matter. I think I’m going to attach it and use it. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change it later.

If the rings I bought work with the Savage, I’ll be able to set it up today, and I might even be able to zero it.

I already entered the Savage and my Thompson Center .204 in my Kestrel calculator. You have to name your guns. I chose Betty and Veronica. When it comes to the Ruger, I’m torn between Naomi and Tyra.

The weather people are making horrible predictions. I choose not to believe them. It will NOT rain heavily for 10 consecutive days. I’m not having it. I’m going to get the Ruger zeroed, I may get somewhere with the Savage, and there is hope that I will even make it to a gun range.

To sum up:

1. Do not ever buy Lee dies for any reason.

2. Taper crimping is what you want.

3. Lehigh Xtreme Defender bullets seem pretty good.

4. Rings that fit your tube may bump into other things, so don’t throw out the packaging your rings come in.

5. Do not buy a 20-MOA base for a rifle that can’t shoot longer than 400 yards. I think.

6. Accurate No.7 is the flubber of powder. It does just about everything.

MORE

It’s like something is trying to prevent me from shooting.

I installed the new Anarchy Outdoors titanium bolt shroud on the Ruger Precision Rifle, and it’s wonderful. Installation literally takes 10 seconds once you have the bolt out. Now the bolt slides in and out like greased glass. But when I tried to put the new scope base on the Savage 93R, it turned out Amazon had let me down. I needed a base with a 1-5/8″ ejection recess, as described in the ad, and they sent me one with a 1-3/8″ recess. In case you have a Savage 93R with a 1-5/8″ port, you need the EGW base, model 41602. That’s assuming you want 20 MOA.

I have a Smaug-like mass of .17 HMR, and I can’t shoot it because of scope problems. I could just slap the old Burris back on the rifle, but I really want to use an MRAD scope.

On the up side, the low Seekins rings I bought for the Athlon scope are the perfect height, so I don’t have to go through with an Amazon return. I ordered two sets of higher rings. I’ll send one set back and keep one for the T/C Venture. I was concerned Amazon would give me problems because I had already messed up the packaging on the low rings.

I can’t reload 9mm. I can’t shoot the Savage. I can’t shoot the Venture.

I have a jug of Vihtavuori powder for .45 ACP. I have enough bullets to crank out about 300 rounds of JHP. I guess I could do that. I can still shoot the AR-15 and the RPR, and of course, there are always .22’s. Life could be worse.

Thompson Center’s $460 Laser

It may sound shocking, but I went outside to shoot again today, and it didn’t rain.

Okay. It did rain. But not enough to drive me inside.

I am still working on my ammo savings account. I want to have a stockpile in every useful caliber. In order to do this, I need to know which cartridges work. You don’t want to buy a thousand cartridges your gun hates. I have been itching for a chance to shoot my Thompson Center Venture so I could find out whether I wanted 32-grain or 40-grain bullets. Today I made it happen.

The results were pretty neat.

First, I should talk about my optic. Only noobs say “scope.” I say “optic.” And “polymer” instead of “plastic.”

I used an ATN X-Sight II night scope. Optic. I got this thing a couple of years back as a lark, using credit card points. It’s cheap by night OPTIC standards. It doesn’t do thermal. It’s infrared. Infrared is not as good as thermal, but this is cold comfort to the many pigs and coons who have been infraredded to the nether region.

I am no expert, even though I say “optic,” but I’ll give you my take on the–okay–scope anyway. There is nothing wrong with it. Expensive stuff is always better, but you can take this thing out of the box, put it on your gun, and shoot very, very well. The imaging is pretty bad, but that doesn’t matter if you hit what you point your rifle at. It’s not about pretty pictures.

It’s really just a smartphone in a metal case. I don’t think it has any real lenses in it. The magnification comes from zooming the picture. As a result, you get wavy, blurry scenes. Imagine zooming your Iphone to 25x and taking a photo. That’s the deal.

It has some neat stuff in it. You can move the crosshairs around, and that makes zeroing easy. You fire a shot, put the crosshairs on your original point of aim, move a second set of crosshairs to the place where the bullet landed, and push a button. You’re zeroed. Pretty much.

It records video. It tells you which direction you’re facing. You can set it to record your shots. It will record while you shoot, and when it feels recoil, it will save all the video surrounding the shot.

I don’t know what all it does. If you want to shoot things at night, and you don’t want to spend several thousand dollars, this thing will get it done. For the price, which was $600, it’s just fine.

That being said, shooting it at targets is unpleasant because the quality of the image is so bad. I think the best thing is to save it for night hunting and use a real scope for everything else.

I will post a target photo.

I shot three 40-grain rounds at the bottom-left bullseye. You will see the holes clearly…on the top-right bullseye. I zeroed the scope and shot 6 more rounds. They clustered in a small area to the left of the bottom-left bullseye. Can’t swear they all hit the paper, but it looks like they did. The zero was still not right, but it was close. The grouping was jim-dandy. Excellent for a hunting gun. No complaints.

I worked on the zero and fired 6 more rounds at the bottom-left bullseye. As you can see, they made one little hole. That was pretty sweet. I shoot this gun better than my Ruger Precision Rifle. At least for 6 rounds, I did.

If they didn’t go through the same hole, then they missed the paper entirely, and I’m confident enough in my shooting to say that did not happen.

I put 32-grain cartridges in the gun and shot some more, at the bottom-right bullseye. I didn’t do badly at all, but as you can see, the bullets made more than one hole. I call it 1.5 MOA. Either the 32-grain ammo doesn’t shoot as well, or fatigue got to me. It’s taxing to fight with your shooting bags when you’re still working things out, and the scope kept turning on and off because a power cable was not attached tightly.

I was tired of the scope, and I was not comfortable with my rear bag setup, so I got in the cart and drove home. Now I feel very confident about ordering 40-grain rounds. They appear to shoot quite well. They have a higher BC than the little bullets. They are more powerful. I lose a little velocity, but I think 3650 (according to the box) will not be slow enough to give me buyer’s remorse.

It’s pretty cool, putting 6 rounds in one very small hole. I don’t know how fluky it was, but it means more than a three-shot group.

The gun is very good. Thompson Center guarantees 3 shots into 1 MOA, and clearly, it will do that. The ammo is shockingly good, especially considering the price. It has ballistic tips, too, so it’s useful. It’s not just for targets. It will drop coyotes where they stand. Some people shoot deer with these things. That seems like a bad idea, but they do it.

I now have 1000 rounds on the way. That should be a sufficient buffer against Joe Biden and the day when Antifa and Congress become indistinguishable.

I’m going to put a Vortex PST on the gun and keep the ATN for shooting after dark and shooting with video. It will be nice shooting through a scope that isn’t like looking through a shower door.

I have an Athlon scope on the way. Some say it’s better than a Gen II Vortex PST, and the scope I’m putting on the TC is a Gen I. The Athlon is for my Savage .17 HMR. If it turns out to be better than my Vortex Gen I, I’ll put the Athlon on the .204 and the Vortex on the Savage. Presumably, I will never be able to use the Savage from over 300 yards, so it doesn’t need as good a scope as the .204. I think.

I’m pretty happy shooting this well with what seems to be a very basic stock. I am not totally convinced of the need for fancy stocks. If your barrel is free-floated and you have a good cheek weld, how does a fancy stock help you? Not sure. The stock that came with the gun appears to work fine, and it’s indestructible.

The results I got today give me hope that I will eventually be a good rifle shot. I’m already okay, but I want to be better.

Shoot Accurately with Cheap Ammo

It has not rained today. Hard to believe. I actually got to shoot my Ruger Precision Rifle.

I’ll post the target. I started at the bottom left and went clockwise. I shot 30 rounds.

Things are looking up. That may not be the most impressive target on earth, but I see a big difference since the last time I shot the gun.

The stuff at bottom left generally went into one inch. I think the three outliers are flyers caused by technique failure. I think this gun will shoot sub-MOA with this ammo all day, provided the shooter has it together.

I zeroed the scope as well as I could on the previous outing. It rained, so I was not able to do everything I wanted. Today I decided to move the zero around. That explains the second group (top left), which is still a lot better than I used to shoot with other rifles.

The flyer at right is me adjusting the scope, and the farthest shots to the left were also caused by scope adjustments. That means the rest, fired at the final zero setting, were very close together.

I think the shots that piled into the center of the bullseye on the top right represent the rifle’s actual zero. I was fiddling with technique, and I was getting annoyed with my rear bag. I think that’s why the entire 10-round group takes up so much space.

I love 6.5 Creedmoor. It shoots as well as .17 HMR, but it reaches a lot farther out and kills things like deer and bears. And the recoil is a joke.

While I was in the pasture shooting, I ordered a bigger rear bag. I think it will make things much easier.

The ammunition is wonderful. I bought a lot of it. As mentioned in an earlier post, a Youtuber with a Ruger Precision Rifle shot it into a small gong, over and over, at 656 yards, so I have a lot of faith in it. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when I take the gun to a longer shooting lane.

I’m learning more about long-range shooting. I learned that an expert’s advice was not very good.

I bought a book by Ryan Cleckner, a former sniper who teaches people to shoot. I also watched him on Youtube. In a video, he provided his method for aligning a scope’s reticle with a rifle. Most scopes have flat surfaces on their undersides, and many rifles have flat surfaces on top of them. Cleckner says to stick a rectangular object between the scope and rifle so both are pressing against it. This aligns the rifle’s top surface and the scope’s bottom surface.

Problem: it doesn’t align the reticle with anything. Not accurately, anyway.

Scope manufacturers don’t align their reticles perfectly with the housings of their scopes. Some have tolerances of up to 3°. If you’re shooting at a target 1000 yards off, your bullet will drop maybe 30 feet. Thirty feet times the sine of 3° is about 19″. That means you can be aiming 19″ to the side of your intended impact point. That’s a big deal.

I don’t think this applies when you’re using your turrets to change your point of aim, but I can see how it would be a problem if you were using your reticle. Or maybe I’m wrong. Are the little things inside scopes that move reticles really aligned with the reticles? Now my head hurts.

I am amazed that a person who holds himself out to be an expert would drop the ball like that, but I shouldn’t be. Am I saying I know more than he does? No. I got the information about scope reticle tolerances from other experts, and I have concluded, tentatively, that they know more than he does.

Maybe I’ll read something tomorrow that will convince me he’s right. That would be nice, because otherwise, I have to get some of my scopes leveled. I don’t think it will matter for .17 HMR, because it pretty much dies before it drops 20 inches, but it could be worth the trouble for .204 Ruger, .223, and .308.

In his book, he says he doesn’t believe in rifle levels. He says he has no faith in them because they may have more internal error than the people and equipment they’re supposed to help. Maybe that’s a gadget I can forgo.

I don’t know the answers. Right now, I just want to be able to hit a gong 900 yards away on the first try with every one of my high-powered rifles. Surely I should be able to gather enough sound advice to get to that point, even if the people I listen to aren’t right about everything.

Whatever. I now have a very nice shooting platform that blocks most of the sun and rain, I have a good deal of cheap, accurate ammo, and I have my rifle set up well enough to hit a few things. Onward and upward.

There are Little Raptures Everywhere

As days go, this one has been pretty good. I helped my friends Alonzo and Teri move into their first non-rented house.

Alonzo and I were armorbearers at Miami’s Trinity Church, under the authority of the fine family of pastors that made public-nudity enthusiast Kim Kardashian one of America’s best-known Christians. The armorbearers used to meet for breakfast at a Denny’s on Hallandale Beach Boulevard, and I used to talk about the importance of speaking in tongues and getting free of iniquities and demons. Alonzo was always quiet. I thought he was just waiting for me to shut up. In reality, he was taking it all in.

He and his family lived in a pretty bad situation. They had part of a house in Liberty City, which is about like South Central L.A. He hated his job. Things weren’t going all that well.

Over time, he and Teri moved closer to God, and he blessed them. They moved to a place farther north, away from their relatives. Then they moved to Orlando. This was a step up from South Florida, which is a very dark and corrupt place, but it could have been better. After Orlando, they moved to Sanford, and now they’re between Sanford and Ocala in a very rural setting. They own the house they’re moving into. It has 5 bedrooms. It’s in a quiet, peaceful area packed with conservative Christians.

If you know this blog, you know I had a young friend named Travis Quinn. He was also an armorbearer. He was a lawless ghetto kid. He started listening to me. He tried the things I was doing. God changed him a great deal. He found himself living in Coral Gables, as my house sitter, going to the University of Miami on a music scholarship.

Unfortunately, he was shot accidentally in April. We were told his injuries weren’t a big deal. Then his condition worsened, and he died. During his last month, he wasn’t able to communicate with anyone except his family.

I had assumed Travis would be my big success story, but it looks like Alonzo and Teri got what I thought he would get. They have 5 wonderful kids. Their marriage keeps getting better. Now Alonzo says God is talking to him. He says God told him that if he fasted, God would do things for him, with no effort from Alonzo, that would amaze him. Alonzo fasted, and suddenly Alonzo found himself able to move into his house ahead of schedule. He didn’t have to pay his last month’s rent. He didn’t have to pay a power bill he thought was coming due.

The place where he used to live was better than the places where he lived before, but it wasn’t perfect. People smoked dope where his kids could smell it. The neighbors weren’t great. Now he’s in a thinly populated area where life is very, very easy.

His kids will be two miles from school. There is a big grocery store so close he can walk to it. There is a great pizza place a mile and a half away. Three of the kids now have their own bedrooms. It’s wonderful.

He and Teri have had the same coronavirus experience I’ve had: peace and plenty. They both have jobs. No one they know has gotten sick. It’s as though God has wrapped them in a blanket.

Moving was a breeze. It’s July in Florida, and it should be about 95 degrees outside. It was very comfortable today. I joked because I felt a drop of sweat at one point and had to run for shade. Ordinarily, my clothes would have been sticking to me after 20 minutes. I don’t even need a shower.

He took me to lunch today, and the pizza place we found was excellent. It was surgically clean, the staff was great, and the food was wonderful.

We talked about the time we live in. As former Miami residents, we agreed that it feels like the day before a hurricane. If you haven’t experienced a hurricane, you won’t understand, but things are extremely quiet the day before one arrives. The sensation is peaceful, but ominous. Many people are saying the rapture is nearly here. As Christians know, the rapture will be followed by the storm of God’s wrath.

I keep feeling the rapture will take place in December. For a while, it seemed like the 24th was the day. Then it seemed like the 11th was correct. I don’t know the answer, but I have a strong sense that I will not be on earth in 2021. I hope the rapture is coming, because the coronavirus, #MeToo, Antifa, and BLM curses we’re enduring seem to be part of a larger pattern of destruction which is going to get worse, not better. I have no desire to be here to see fools and brothers to apes rule us without God’s opposition.

I have been invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Alonzo says he wants to have a real Thanksgiving dinner at his own house. That will be great. It’s less than an hour away, so it will be very convenient to drive down and then transport myself back so I can lie on my back and recover.

They live fairly close to a 900-yard gun range, so that will give me more reason to visit their area.

I still know people who are mired in South Florida. Alonzo and I think God moves people to better places as they get closer to him. There are areas where nice Christian people are concentrated. It seems that God wants to preserve these places as though he were weeding gardens. I don’t think he wants to move too many backward people there. The same principle can be seen in the Bible. When the Jews behaved badly, their land spat them out. They only lived there and did well when they were obedient. The modern era is exceptional, because God moved them back while most of them were still atheists and leftists, but many have come around.

I think God let me fester in Miami because I belonged there. I would hate to go back. Today I saw “Miami” on road signs, and it made my insides tense up.

I think I’m as happy about Alonzo’s move as he is. It’s wonderful to see someone get in gear and catch God’s blessings.

We Think he Will Make his Move Soon

I made an important decision today. I decided to buy hundreds of rounds of Sellier & Bellot 6.5 Creedmoor FMJ ammo for rifle practice.

The ammo problem is pretty bad right now. You can still get nearly anything you want, if you’re willing to pay maybe 1.75 times what it’s worth. Personally, I am not willing to do that, and I do not understand people who are.

I don’t buy ammunition in person, because you have to be a chump to do that. You drive around to the few stores in your area, and then you find out they don’t have what you want or they do have it and the price is insane. A lot of people still do this, and it must be a good thing from where I sit, because I use the Internet, and if they were using it, too, there would be no good deals left for me.

Some people buy in person, and others go to ripoff websites and pay their insane prices. I know this, because the sites run out. It amazes me that people would rather be milked than spend a few minutes searching the web.

I just spent about an hour looking for what I wanted at a good price. I could have spent well over a dollar per round and given up after 10 minutes. I knew someone out there had to be selling for between 60 and 70 cents, so I persevered, and I got what I needed.

Why did I buy Sellier & Bellot? I’ve already mentioned it. This stuff is phenomenal. If you look around, you can find a site showing 2″ groups fired from 300 yards. This is about 2/3 MOA. The guy who tested it got a velocity spread of 7 fps.

Is it the best 6.5 Creedmoor ammo available? I’m sure it’s not, but I will be very surprised if, during the next year, I get so good I can shoot 2/3-MOA/300-yard groups with anything. This ammunition will shoot better than I can, and I don’t see that changing any time soon, so it seems to me it’s a tremendous bargain.

Any ammo that will hit a rat reliably 900 feet away is good ammo.

I should try their soft-point ammo. Maybe it’s just as good, and it would work if I needed to shoot for food.

Some people look down on Sellier & Bellot. It tends to be cheap. Thing is, they have an impressive modern factory. You can see a video tour on Youtube. In comparison, CCI’s .22 factory looks like a converted garage. That is not much of an exaggeration. Sellier & Bellot is a serious company. If their ammo is cheap, so much the better. Cost and quality are not always closely related.

I could not shoot today. Of course, it rained. It rains every day. I have no idea when it will stop. I’m going to have to start shooting before noon. It’s nearly always dry then.

I am cornering the .17 HMR market, and if I can ever get outside to shoot, I’ll be using my Savage 93R to work on my prone shooting. It’s cheaper to shoot than most pistols, and if the wind is still, it will shoot into an inch at 100 yards. Hard to imagine a better cheap training round. If the wind isn’t still, that will be fine, because I’ve had some training in dealing with wind, and I need to put it to use.

I’m going to try an Athlon scope on the 93R. I already have a Burris scope, but having trained to use mil-dot optics, I see no point in continuing to fool with different technology. I like the idea of learning to use the Burris correctly, but after that, there seems to be no reason to continue.

With the Burris, you shoot at various ranges and take note of where your shots land, and then you use the information later to help you make use of the holdover marks on the reticle. With my training and equipment, I’m supposed to test the ammo with a chronograph, enter data into my ballistic calculator, determine the range to targets, and aim where the calculator tells me to. It’s supposed to enable me to hit things on the first shot at any distance. I didn’t pay a load of money to take a class to learn all this so I could forget about it and go back to Elmer Fudd technology.

In order to get an Athlon, I had to go for crazy magnification. I had to choose between 8 and 25, and 8 was not going to fly. I think 25 is a lot for .17 HMR, but on the other hand, if I hunt with it, I might be hunting tiny critters with kill zones the size of ping pong balls. It seems like the best choice for the money.

The Vortex company made a name for itself using Asian-made scopes to compete with expensive Caucasian optics. Primary Arms came along and did the same thing to Vortex, undercutting their prices. Now Athlon is undercutting both of them, and the scope I’m getting is supposed to be as good as, or better than, the thousand-dollar Vortex I own. It costs $400. How can I not try that?

What if it turns out to be better than the Vortex? I’ll feel pretty stupid. I paid over $800 for it.

I still need to make a few ammo purchases to get me into the security zone. Once I feel like I have a few years’ supply, I’ll put my ammo away and start buying fresh ammo to shoot. That’s the plan.

Thank God I’m not doing this with food. Today someone sent me an ad for dried disaster rations. On sale, they wanted about $120 for 25,000 calories. So 12 dollars per day for 10 days, and then you starve. I think I can beat that at the grocery store. I fail to see the bargain. Ordinary stores carry a lot of things that will last a decade or more in a pantry.

If starvation becomes a widespread problem, I would rather just die and leave. How much should I be willing to fight to stay in this world, when I’m a heartbeat away from a place where no one is hungry and they never need air conditioning? Eating rehydrated desperation food from a 5-gallon pail is not my idea of living.

Now that the RPR is working, I should go visit the long distance range. Wednesday would be a good day for that. My farm is fine for a hundred yards, but the range offers 900, and there are no cattle walking between shooters and targets.

I’m not far from completing my basic armory and ammo dump. Once I’m done, the credit card companies may send people to see if I’m okay. When I stop spending money, they may assume I’m dead.

Doing Things Right is Fun

It’s a big day. I finally shot my Ruger Precision Rifle.

The other day, I set up a roofed platform in the pasture. Today I put my shooting mat on it and zeroed the RPR at 100 yards. The rifle is very nice. The trigger seems to be just as good as a Savage Accutrigger. The bolt is a little rough, but I assume that can be fixed.

It’s surprising how it bangs around. In comparison, the bolt on my cheap Savage 93R is like greased glass.

I don’t have a target photo to put up. It started raining after I shot about 10 rounds, and I quit after 20. I didn’t feel like stopping the cart in the rain to take a photo.

It wasn’t an impressive target anyway. I was adjusting the scope as I shot, so it’s not like I produced a nice, tight group or set of groups.

The recoil was a joke. I can’t even tell you what it feels like, because I don’t remember. When you shoot a .308, you will definitely have some memory of what you felt. It really looks like .308 is an obsolete cartridge. Bad recoil, short range, a parabolic trajectory, and terminal results that are no better than 6.5 Creedmoor. And it seems like ammo is more expensive.

Our military agrees with me. A number of outfits are abandoning the .308 and switching to Creedmoor.

And here I am with lots of .308 ammo.

I used Sellier & Bellot FMJ, which is cheap. A guy on Youtube posted a video in which he hit a small gong with it repeatedly at 656 yards, so I assume it’s good enough for zeroing a scope and getting started. If I shoot something more expensive, I should still be on the paper, so changing the zero should be quick.

I would say I’m shooting a little over 1 MOA. I don’t know if it’s fair to say anything about me, the gun, or the ammunition after 20 rounds. New guns sometimes take a little while to start shooting precisely. I don’t know if that’s the case with my gun and this ammo, but it could be.

I’m still getting accustomed to new things I learned when I took my shooting course. I need to sit down with a couple hundred rounds and get used to prone shooting. Seems like every time I go out, the rain drives me inside after a few shots. It can’t do that every day forever. Eventually, I’ll get to practice.

I am loading up on .17 HMR. Sellier & Bellot 6.5 Creedmoor is cheap, but .17 HMR is much cheaper. My goal is to keep 4000 rounds on hand. I don’t want to get caught empty-handed if Kamala Harris becomes president after Biden is forcibly deposed.

I may put a new scope on the .17 HMR rifle. My old scope is a very nice Burris Fullfield II something-14x. It has clear glass, but it won’t work well with the shooting methods I’ve learned. I was taught to use target turrets and grids. My scope has three lines below the horizontal crosshair, they don’t seem to have any relationship to any particular caliber, and it has no target turrets.

I guess it would be smart to have some versatility and develop the ability to use this type of scope, and maybe that is particularly true for a caliber that shouldn’t be used past 200 yards. Maybe I should be able to guess bullet drops within that short range. I want to use what I learned, though! I have a Kestrel I haven’t even used.

I’m looking at the Burris manual. It says they expect you to take your gun and ammo to a range and figure out the yardages the horizontal marks correspond to. Then you write the figures down and use them. I guess that makes sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help much with wind, and .17 HMR blows around like crazy.

I can stick a 4-14X Primary Arms scope on the Savage with an EGW 20-MOA base and some sort of rings. That ought to do the job. After that, I can take the Savage out and shoot it up to 300 yards and learn how to use a rifle. What I learn shooting .17 HMR can then be applied to other calibers.

It looks like I’ve blown maybe $2000 on the wrong scopes over about 12 years. Oh, well. It could be worse. I could be spending a hundred bucks a weekend to waste my time playing golf. My dad paid $180,000 for a fishing boat, and buying fuel meant filling tanks that held 775 gallons. My hobbies seem frugal compared to golf and fishing, which are relatively worthless pursuits.

I’ve spent quite a bit of money on equipment and ammo this year. I did the right thing. I’m buying before the start of the real insanity, and guns and ammo are very important. They can provide safety and food. To me, a thousand-dollar couch is a dreadful indulgence, but 10,000 rounds of .22 ammunition are a wise and necessary investment.

This week I plan to visit a long range gun range to see what they can do for me. That should be fantastic.

If I ever get to finish a shooting session before being drenched, I’ll write about it here. It will be a welcome change.

Shattering Idols May Get you Promoted

A while back, I got banned from The High Road, a contentious and unpleasant firearms forum, for saying (correctly) that a gun writer named Massad Ayoob had no business giving people legal advice. The moderators banned me, claiming I had violated the rules. Either that was a lie, or they have a rule against discussing Massad Ayoob honestly. At least a couple of forum bigwigs know him personally.

He’s not a lawyer. He’s not even a real cop, not that cops know much about the law. They do not.

He was a part-time cop (“captain” over 5 officers) in a nearly crime-free town the size of a high school. I thought he had no education at all, but today I learned he has a bachelor’s degree in business, from a college with an 84% acceptance rate. So he should be able to manage a hardware store or a restaurant. It’s not legal training.

I don’t know why it was so hard to find evidence that he had a degree. I did try. Maybe he downplays his education because it’s so obvious it didn’t prepare him to discuss things like law, ballistics, firearm design, ammunition design, or bullet wounds. Also, if he touts his background, people may look at it and marvel at the lack of military and big-city police experience.

From my non-expert standpoint, I guess (“guess”) he can speak with some intelligence about using a gun to defend yourself, but it appears he learned what he knows through a career as a writer. So he’s a bit like a person who Googles something a lot and then writes about what he read. That would make him more like Mr. Beauchamp than English Bob and Little Bill.

Self-taught people can be very sharp, but when it comes to law, it hasn’t worked out that way for Ayoob. His writings about the law impress laymen, and they probably impress bad lawyers, but they’re not great. His advice for people who use lethal force is scary, and it comes from a person who, like all laymen, is barred by law from representing people in legal matters. He’s probably right 75% of the time. Any half-bright person who reads up will usually be right about the law. The problem is that you can be right most of the time and still not know what you’re doing.

He used to be nearly alone in his field. As recently as two decades ago, not many people wrote seriously about self-defense tactics. Now you can use Google and find a huge number of people who have what appear to be superior qualifications. You can find experienced cops (who have actually had to shoot at criminals), Navy SEAL’s, Delta Force retirees, former military instructors, people who have worked in various government jobs involving firearms, individuals who have run private security firms, and so on. You can find real ballistics experts and wound experts, and you can find competitive shooters who have done much better than Ayoob. You can find lots of very skilled people who design and make guns. You can find extremely knowledgeable people who make ammunition. You can also find a lot of qualified attorneys who are willing to give general advice from a position of some authority.

Ayoob has done some good work, but it seems to me that his reputation as an oracle was never justified, and in 2020, it’s less justified than ever. No one has the last word on all things gun-related. People who hold themselves out to be demigods say dumb things all the time, and in the right circumstances, even a true expert can be corrected by an intelligent person who spots an error. Nonetheless, many gun enthusiasts quote him as though he were God himself.

Anyway, I got the boot, and it was pleasant news, because the forum was full of angry, condescending pedants and posers. Many gun forums are like that. It’s a shame, because people need good information on firearms, and if we’re going to keep our gun rights, we need to have some sense of community.

The moderators were arrogant, pompous, unfair, and rude. Not all the time, but enough. Visiting the forum was like visiting an abusive parent in the process of losing is faculties. It was necessary to walk on eggs in order to avoid starting kerfuffles that drove threads off-track and destroyed the purpose of posting. I limited my visits. Before posting, I would ask myself if the benefit was worth the aggravation.

I didn’t sit down today to write about being expelled from the playpen. That was just background. I felt like writing because I wanted to talk about the pleasant experiences I’ve had at another forum.

I tried to join two forums after I was paroled from The High Road, and there were some weird issues with my IP address, so I didn’t succeed right away. Finally, one of them let me in. I’m glad I made it, because my experience there has been infinitely better than my experiences at places like The High Road and The Firing Line.

The High Road and The Firing Line are related forums.They sprang from the same root. A bitter, ugly conflict caused a schism. They share at least one moderator.

The Firing Line is somewhat less unpleasant, but it’s still very flawed. One of the problems both forums have is denial. The people who run them are deluded. They think they can build bridges and attract leftists. As a result, members have to be very careful about mentioning politics and God. Things that matter to most gun enthusiasts.

My guess is that the proprietors want to make money by attracting people and selling ads. Or maybe there are some leftists among the owners. I don’t know. But the result is that they end up stifling the population segment that feeds them. Of course, the vast majority of the members are conservative, and many are Christian. They should be welcomed and encouraged, but they’re treated as though they embarrass the management.

When I joined the new forum, I got some big surprises.

First, I had to post an introduction. I got so many friendly responses, I had to shut off notifications. Everyone wanted to say hi, and they posted photos representing their states. That will never happen at The High Road or The Firing Line. I didn’t know what to make of it.

After that, I looked at the history of the place and the rules. It was created because other forums were lame, and they don’t tolerate rudeness.

I found a thread some character started. He was thrilled it was Sunday, because that was football day. Remember when it used to be church day? Spectator sports have always competed against churches and synagogues. That’s by Satan’s design.

Almost no one who responded was happy about football day. They criticized the unpatriotic, whiny pre-game protestors. They said they had better things to watch on TV. The guy who started the thread started responding in anger, and he got banned the next day.

This is typical of sports cultists. They have a demonic devotion to teams and players who do extremely trivial things for a living. You can tell they have a problem, because they get angry at people who say they’re not fans. If you say you don’t watch football, American men are likely to get upset with you. They may even insinuate that you’re a homosexual, which is a little weird, given the big homosexuality problem in football and other contact sports. Ordinarily, heterosexuals are less likely to want to watch big, sweaty muscular men in tight pants, and let’s not even talk about wearing a Target jersey with another man’s name on it.

I was amazed to see how people responded to the football thread. Especially the moderators. I felt at home.

They also have a religion forum. You can go in and talk openly about the antichrist, the rapture, and Jesus. That’s amazing. If you tried that at The High Road, it would never fly. Check out their rule:

We have learned from bitter experience that discussions of politics, abortion, religion, and sexual orientation often degenerate into less-than-polite arguments or claims that “my God is better than your God”. For this reason, we do not discuss such subjects on THR, and any threads dealing primarily with these subjects will be closed or deleted immediately.

They suggest rudeness and conflict are their concerns. The truth is that they allow rudeness all the time. They’re just afraid of offending non-Christians.

The new forum allows religious conversations, and they even have a chaplain. You can post prayer requests.

As for politics, they boot people who start anti-gun threads. They haven’t sold their souls. They know who supports them. The forum itself has a pro-Second-Amendment position. They say so. No hiding.

You can go to a thread and say rioters are spoiled criminals who want to promote socialism. You can say the police should blast them with water cannons to restore peace. No problem!

In short, it’s a much healthier place. The people are nice, the moderators understand who they need to attract and retain, and they don’t pretend to be something they’re not.

One of the signs of a successful Christian walk is seeing venomous, godless people removed from your life. When you’re in need of refinement, God doesn’t want to subject his children to you too much. He wants to bless them, and they can’t have blessed lives if they’re constantly forced to endure obnoxious people. As you improve, he will move you to better places. I saw this principle at work when God helped me move out of Miami. I see it in my experience with The High Road. Those people are a mess. Spending time on that forum is like hanging out with toddlers in day-old diapers. It produces a feeling of being besieged. Moving to a nicer place is like taking a shower and putting on fresh clothes.

If you hate the place where you live, and you’re tired of the people around you, maybe you need to clean yourself up so you’re fit to be put somewhere else. That’s how I see it. I love it where I am, but I think God will move me to an even nicer place if I cooperate and grow.

The rapture is the final expression of this principle. When it no longer makes sense to make us stay in this world, God will put us in a place where we are all alike in our hearts. There won’t be any rioters. No one will be pulling down statues. We won’t have to read news stories about pregnant “men.” We’ll never have to picket any abortion clinics. I see why we talk of eternal life as rest.

I feel more motivated to improve. There are rewards. There is relief ahead. It’s worth the trivial sacrifices.

Today is my third day of fasting until 3 p.m. Yesterday, after I was done, I felt bursts of faith that startled me. I felt self-control increasing and the drives of the flesh decreasing. It’s exciting. Maybe this type of fasting is the key to the breakthrough I needed. I don’t know if I’ll ever eat before 3 p.m. again. At the very least, I can see myself abandoning breakfast.

If I want to be separated from the filthiness of the world, I need to be separated from my own filthiness. I want God to bless me by putting me among good people, but if I’m still a mess, he can’t do that, because he won’t want to subject them to my presence.

I hope to keep posting good reports. I hope I’m really onto something.

Too Many Holes

I managed to shoot 30 rounds today from the new platform. Things went well, but not too terribly well.

First, the platform. It’s stable. It’s comfortable. There was no cow spit on it when I went out to shoot, so maybe I don’t have to worry about them licking it.

Now, the shooting. I’ll go ahead and post the target. I was shooting a CORE-15 M-Lok Scout with a 16″ barrel, a LaRue Tactical MBT-2S trigger, a Midwest Industries quick-detach scope mount, and a Primary Arms 4-14x Mil-dot scope. I was using 55-grain Australian Outback ammo, which is pretty much the same thing as Hornady Urban TAP, only better and cheaper.

The bullseyes are 4″ wide. I shot 10 rounds into each one.

I started at the bottom left. If it looks bad, it should. After I finished, I noticed the scope was moving.

I followed the instructions when I mounted the scope, but quick-detach mounts are not like mounts and rings that use screws to hold them on. Ordinarily, you can use a torque wrench to make sure a scope is secure. Quick-detach mounts have weird, gimmicky systems you have to adjust by trial and error. I tried, and I got an error. I stopped shooting, got a screwdriver, and fixed the scope mount.

I shot the bullseye at bottom right next. I adjusted the scope first. I believe I adjusted it before realizing it was loose. Not the best practice. Anyway, I didn’t do all that well.

I shot the top left bullseye last. Seems to me I improved a great deal in some ways but not in others. I have seen stringing before, but this takes the cake. I made an 8-shot-long, contiguous bullet-hole snake, along with two flyers.

I am not a gun expert, but here is what I make of that: the gun will shoot sub-MOA with cheap ammunition and a 16″ non-match barrel, IF I can figure out what I’m doing to make it move sideways.

Is the problem parallax? Well, if it is, why isn’t there vertical stringing? This group is super-tight, vertically. It’s wonderful, if you ignore the width. Parallax isn’t just a horizontal thing, so it seems like a parallax problem would be likely to work along both axes.

I am not completely in love with the trigger I bought. It’s a LaRue MBT-2S. It seems to be a fine trigger, but they send them out with a 4.5-pound pull. That’s kind of heavy for the technique I use. I was taught to bend my finger at a right angle and put the trigger way down near the end, where I get no leverage. This makes any trigger seem heavy, so 4.5 pounds may be more than I need.

The funny thing is that the point of the new technique is to stabilize the rifle horizontally.

How is my cheek weld? Not that great. My scope is inexpensive, and it has a small eye box or area in which you have to put your eye to make it work well. It’s not easy to get situated accurately, consistently. Maybe I should think about a new buttstock or some kind of pad. I have read that cheek weld problems can cause horizontal stringing.

Of course, practice is also a major factor. I haven’t been able to practice because of rain, lack of a suitable platform, and equipment issues. I think I’m going to get out the .17 HMR and get some practice in. The ammo is really cheap, and it’s very, very accurate.

Why am I complaining about a relatively inexpensive rifle, scope, and ammo that appears to be able to nail squirrels reliably at 100 yards? Because it’s stupid to shoot badly if you can shoot better. Why not keep fixing your problems? I don’t think there is anything significant wrong with the gun, ammo, or scope, so I believe I can get considerably more precision if I try.

Shooting Platform Finished

I feel like I got my life back just now. I put my new shooting platform down in the pasture. Photos below.

Here, I’m seeing if the tractor forks tear the platform up before lifting it.

Here, I’ve decided to go for it.

Here, you can see the cattle resenting me for disturbing their rest.

Here, I’ve selected the platform’s location.

Here, the platform is situated in its final resting place.

The pasture has an old wooden fort sort of thing designed for kids. It’s not in great shape, and I’m not all that interested in swingsets and so on, so I don’t maintain it. I considered putting a new roof on it and using it as a place to sit while I wait for varmints. Decided not to do it. Anyway, the best and safest location for the platform lines me up so I shoot under the fort.

The tractor didn’t damage the platform at all. If you tried, you could find some little marks where the forks pressed against the wood. That’s about it.

I can move it whenever I want, so if I get brave and decide I want to shoot at 400 yard, I can do it. I have to balance my desire to shoot well against my desire to not shoot the neighbors and go to prison.

The dangers of outdoor shooting, for responsible people who shoot well, are not as great as one might think. The odds of my firing a shot so wild it would leave my property are infinitesimal. The odds of a guest firing such a shot are considerably greater, so it may well be that no one except me will ever be allowed to use the platform.

Hitting another house would be pretty difficult. In addition to missing the berm and the ground past it, you would probably have to shoot several hundred times just to have one shot make it through the woods.

I’ve let noobs shoot pistols at short range on my property, and I let two people I knew were not idiots shoot rifles, but that’s about as far as I’ll go. I have never let anyone shoot without me present.

What to do now?

It’s blistering hot. Do I really want to go out there and shoot? I guess I should. Laziness always finds an excuse. I put a roof on my platform to make excuses harder to swallow.

I hope things work out well. For all the expense and work, I think I should receive a substantial return.