What Single Men do on Vacation
Wednesday, June 24th, 2020More Data for the Gitmo Admissions Committee
I’m white, I’m male, I’m conservative, I’m a far-out Christian who speaks in tongues every day, and I shoot as a hobby. My blog has been banned secretly by the Department of Defense, as a hate site, for reasons that have never been revealed to me. What more can I add to my resume?
How about long-range rifle shooting? That ought to move me up a few spaces on several secret lists.
I’m getting ready for my first precision rifle shooting course. Right now, I’m more of a spray-and-giggle shooter. I take semiauto .22’s out to the berm and blast away at steel targets with humorous shapes. The course will have me shooting match .308 ammunition at 1000 yards.
I don’t know what more I can do to attract persecution. I should just send Joe Biden a letter requesting he have me disappeared the day after the inauguration. Assuming he gets inaugurated, which I don’t. I think leftists are scaring normal people to the polls.
If he gets elected, and he’s too busy to disappear me the day after the inauguration, Kamala Harris can always do it two days later, after she assumes command due to Biden’s dementia, which the press will suddenly discover.
You have to wonder how military people, who tend to be conservative, are going to feel when things go nuts and leftist regimes require them to guard conservative and Christian dissidents at Guantanamo and black sites while relatively liberal Deep State intelligence people torment them. They’ll probably end up guarding many of their friends.
I never really thought about the political contrast between the CIA and the military before.
The Deep State and its hostility toward conservatives are absolutely real. The more time passes, the more things happen that confirm that right-wing conspiracy nuts aren’t nuts at all. Not about the important things.
I am scheduled to take a class soon, and I’m trying to figure out what I need. The people who teach the class are not great at communication, and I have never been to a PRS (Precision Rifle Shooting) class before.
I had to get a couple of shooting bags. I’ve used a Rock Jr. rest and various bipods, but I have never shot off a bag. I chose the Armageddon Gear Game Changer front bag and the Armageddon Gear X-Wing rear bag. They arrived today. I put them on the dinner table and plopped the LR-308 onto them. Very nice. I see what I’ve been missing. They’re much more cooperative than rests and bipods, and the scope seems much more stable.
I realized my fancy tactical sling won’t work with the LR-308 until I get the right swivel for the handguard. I’ll probably have to cannibalize a sling from another gun, along with one swivel.
Today I bought a Gore-Tex rain jacket. It’s surprisingly hard to do this here. Gander Outdoors is gone, Dick’s Sporting Goods (spit) has nothing useful, Rural King doesn’t have Gore-Tex, and I didn’t even try the mall because it looked so bad the last time I was there. I found a nice jacket at Bass Pro, and it comes with a tiny bag. You can wad the entire jacket up and stuff it in the bag, and it takes up about as much room as a foot-long sub.
I like Gore-Tex. It’s likely to rain at the class, and it will definitely be hot, so I want something that keeps rain out and lets water vapor out. I don’t think evaporation will be all that helpful, but it has to be somewhat better than wearing a plastic jacket that doesn’t even try to release vapor.
I’m supposed to bring some tools. When they suggested that, they poked the wrong bear. I’m trying to whittle my choices down to things that will fit in one toolbox. I guess a cleaning kit, some Allen wrenches, and a can of One Shot should get me where I need to be.
They don’t provide lunch, and the food situation in the area is, well, there isn’t any. I have to figure out how to provide lunch for myself two days in a row.
I guess I should take a notebook. A real one, not a PC.
I looked at shooting glasses today at Bass Pro. The ones I have are cheap yellow plastic. I think they cost $14.99 at Gander Outdoors. I thought I should get something better. Bass Pro had Oakleys for $256. They looked exactly the same as the $14.99 ones. Am I missing something here? I decided I didn’t need new ones.
I want to take the bags out and pop off a few .223 rounds. The other day I shot 1 MOA at 50 yards using an uncooperative bipod and a plastic table with a railroad spring sitting on it to take out the bounce. If I can do that with terrible equipment, one would think I could shoot 1 MOA consistently with a good set of bags, even using the plastic table.
Maybe I’m going to be a good long-range shooter. That would be nice.
When I first started shooting at 100 yards with scopes, I refused to take my left hand off the guns. I was stubborn. I felt like a shooter who didn’t hold the gun with both hands was so uninvolved, it was almost unnecessary for him to be there.
I used bad ammunition, mostly, and I got something like 3 MOA. I now think most of the error was due to my efforts to delude myself. The more human being touches a gun, the worse it shoots at long distances. It’s just a fact. To shoot as well as possible, you should mount your gun in a vise and pull the trigger remotely. I think I wasted a ton of ammo trying to disprove something everyone else already knew.
This time, I’ll have a great trigger, match ammunition, a good rest, and good technique. Maybe things will go better.
Ammunition confuses me. On the one hand, people talk about the importance of accurate ammunition, and they say you need handloads to do well. On the other, I’ve got cheap ammunition in at least two calibers that will shoot 1 MOA, guaranteed. How can I reconcile these things? I’m starting to think I shouldn’t listen to people who criticize ammunition I haven’t tried. If you look on the web, you will see people shooting 1.5 MOA with Wolf, which is some of the cheapest ammunition available. If they can do that, maybe ammunition usually isn’t that critical.
Most people can’t shoot. This is a fact of life, and it’s probably caused by stubbornness and lack of training (unless I’m the only one those things affect). It doesn’t prevent them from shooting badly and then going to Internet forums and saying this or that ammunition is accurate or inaccurate. If you shoot 5 MOA on your best day, you’re not qualified to evaluate ammunition or anything else. I’m sure there are people out there telling others certain guns or ammunition are accurate when they really mean they don’t shoot them any worse than other things they shoot badly.
There’s a Youtube guy who does wonderful videos in which he loads .223 ammunition and does systematic experiments to see what shoots best. He has used many powders and bullets, and he bought a high-end barrel. His good loads shoot maybe 0.75 MOA, and his bad ones probably run 3 MOA. I have a bunch of cheap Fiocchi ammo which, I’m pretty sure, will do 1 MOA at 100 yards out of my non-precision AR-15 with the barrel it came with out of the factory. I have seen a guy shoot very tight groups at 200 yards with the same stuff. If Fiocchi will do all that for fifty cents per round, how can the Youtube guy not be wasting his time?
It’s puzzling, but it sure looks like 1) factory barrels on second-tier AR-15’s can shoot 1 MOA, so you don’t need to upgrade unless you’re extremely picky, and 2) there is no point at all in reloading .223.
If I can shoot 1 MOA, then I have the potential to put a bullet in a 3″ circle at 300 yards. That means I should be able to hit prairie dogs three football fields away, reliably. That’s awfully good accuracy, in a world where 4 MOA was very respectable 40 years ago. Will my life really change if I find a load that reduces the circle to 2″?
It’s great to think I can shoot very precisely with cheap ammunition, but it’s a bummer to think I may not be able to justify making my own .223 or .308 rounds. Or .204 Ruger. Dang it.
I found a brand of top-quality .223 rounds with temperature-stabilized powder (not a gimmick) and 55-grain polymer-tip bullets. This is essentially the same thing as a very popular defensive product called Hornady TAP Urban, which is considered a law enforcement product. The stuff I found is packaged in little plastic packets that should preserve it forever, and if I zero my scope at a certain temperature, I can shoot it at a different temperature with nearly no change in the point of impact.
The Hornady stuff, which has been discontinued, sells for 75 cents per round. The stuff I bought costs about 50 cents, and it’s better. I will never have any reason to buy Hornady, and it will be hard to justify buying .223 dies just to make 55-grain ammunition.
Why did I buy defensive .223 ammunition, if I don’t plan to use my rifle defensively? Because I didn’t get the ammunition for use against people. I got it for targets and coons and so on. It can also be used for pigs and deer. But you never know what the future will bring. Maybe I won’t use it, but I’ll end up giving it to someone who needs defensive ammo.
I don’t know whether the gun I’ll be shooting in class will hold 1 MOA, but I’ll bet it will. Other people have done it with this model. It will be funny if it works. I have no doubt at all that it will at least approach 1 MOA. If I can’t make it work, I can get a new barrel for $300.
I guess I should invest in a lunchbox. I don’t know what else I should take with me.
Next time I take a course like this, I’ll have a different rifle in a friendlier caliber that won’t beat me up. That will be nice. I’m not really sure what purpose a .308 serves in 2020.



